M. Lucerohttps://mluce.ro
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3232129521329Mark Twain and the Folklore of Day and Nighthttps://mluce.ro/articles/mark-twain/
https://mluce.ro/articles/mark-twain/#respondWed, 05 Dec 2018 21:15:12 +0000https://mluce.ro/?p=3420If America can be said to have a coherent, unified folklore of its own, then Mark Twain certainly has a place in its history and character. Both a collector of folklore and a source, he grew up in the Mississippi River Valley, living in towns where this lore was current and believed, and knew it intimately. A myriad sayings, proverbs, beliefs, tale patterns, superstitions, and omens are recorded in his works. Too, the images of Tom Sawyer tricking his friends into whitewashing his fence, as well as Huck Finn and Jim lazing on a raft and riding the river, have become immortal pieces of Americana.

Folklore reflects the values and experiences of a culture; but this can be true of individual artists as well, who often utilize folk elements in new and revealing ways. In Twain’s writing, folklore reflects a basic division in his mind and foreshadows some of the writer’s deeper struggles in later life.

Twain’s divided mind has been remarked upon before. Especially in earlier writings like Roughing It, one can see a recurring, sometimes dramatic vacillation between optimism and pessimism. Dr. Forrest Robinson of UC Santa Cruz calls this “a narrative pattern of flow and reflux,” suggesting an origin in Twain’s lifelong fascination with get-rich-quick schemes and early experience in western mining towns before his literary fame.

Frontier miners, Robinson explains, often swung between these two states in the course of their work. Most mining claims were not wildly successful, a fact that inevitably led to discouragement and depression. These low spirits would give way to a hopeful optimism again as the miner continued working his claim, until these alternating mental/emotional states lost their momentum and the miner gave up his hopes as hollow illusions. At this point the pessimistic condition would become permanent.

This dualistic quality seems to affect Twain’s deployment of folklore throughout his works, and especially in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where one can most clearly see the two parallel veins into which folklore flows when guided by Twain’s pen.

In the first vein runs the tall tale, the comical exaggeration, the folk hero, the trickster. This mode will likely feel more characteristic to Twain’s casual readers. Here we see him as the “Wild Humorist of the Western Slope,” the cheerful raconteur, the irrepressible storyteller whose mustache bristles as he winks at his audience at just the right moment.

The second vein is a darker one, a deep, unoxygenated blue that flows far from the memory of daylight. Here Twain invokes omens, superstitions, and belief in the supernatural, which is often almost a fear of the supernatural. Here Twain soaks in the loneliness of the natural world, a paradoxical loneliness when we consider that nature, in this vein of folklore, is often animated with agency, will, and power. Nature here is just short of personified.

It’s with some hesitation that I suggest a terminology for these two veins. “Positive” and “negative” are wrong, since there can be negativity in the one and positivity in the other; whereas “light” and “dark” carry connotations of good and evil. Perhaps the best I can offer is “the folklore of the day” and “the folklore of the night.” But I would stress that there is nothing intrinsically diurnal about the one, nor intrinsically nocturnal about the other. The distinction lies in how Twain uses them and in what they reveal about his own writing and psychology.

Arguably, the folklore of the day is predominant in Twain’s earlier works, tending to overpower the other strain if both are present. In this mode, Twain’s use of folklore is replete with the wit and volubility of Americana, the confident perseverance of American agency. It contains elements such as the folk hero, the tall tale, the trickster, comical exaggerations, and folk sayings and wisdom.

Examples of the folk hero occur as early in Twain’s oeuvre as “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,” when a backwoodsman demonstrates his superiority over the hubristic city dweller. The folk hero’s honesty, simplicity, and ability prevail over a Bowie knife and two pistols, employing only his raw strength and that of nature in the form of the river’s current. Twain’s depictions of riverboat pilots in Life on the Mississippi also fit the folk hero persona: swaggering, larger-than-life, and master of their own small world.

The tall tale form, marked by its brevity, dry style, deadpan delivery, and a moment (often near the end) when listeners suddenly recognize its absurd exaggeration, is also employed by Twain in his fiction. Twain was a master of the deadpan style, a form of humor native to America’s backwoods settlements and tempered by frontier optimism and stoicism. Huck Finn is perhaps Twain’s greatest teller of tall tales. While on the lam with Jim, he effortlessly spins backstories and invented identities whenever need arises, which he narrates to those he meets with an ease that is itself almost shocking, considering he has dreamed them up on the spot. This deadpan earnestness is the soul of the tall tale of folklore, only without the outlandish twist at the end that reveals its obvious fictitious nature.

Comical exaggerations can be seen all throughout Twain, as early as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” whose central character, Jim Smiley, will literally bet on anything — even on whether a parson’s wife will die of an illness. Smiley is not merely an incorrigible gambler, but caricature of one whose excesses are hyperbolic. The case most typical of exaggerations in folklore is found in a cut section from chapter sixteen of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck listens in on boasting contests among a group of raftsmen who outdo each other in trying to be the most outlandish in their claims of strength and power:

I scratch my head with the lightning, and purr myself to sleep with the thunder! When I’m cold, I bile the Gulf of Mexico and bathe in it; when I’m hot I fan myself with an equinoctial storm; when I’m thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge; when I range the earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks! Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and spread!

Twain also employs folk sayings to comical effect, notably in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson. Tom’s Aunt Polly continually rattles off well-known proverbs:

“But old fools is the biggest fools there is.”

“Can’t learn an old dog new tricks.”

“I reckon you’re a kind of singed cat, as the saying is — better’n you look.”

These proverbs are also an example of Twain contributing to folklore, not just recording it. It is often difficult to separate the genuine folk sayings in his works — ones he actually heard growing up in the Mississippi Valley —from ones he adapted or invented himself for specific situations in his books, most notably the chapter epigraphs for Pudd’nhead Wilson.

Again, my term “folklore of the day” does not always mean positivity or lightheartedness: rather, it suggests Twain’s usage of the lore to establish a mood of confidence, wit, and agency. For example, Twain sometimes uses folk sayings & folk conventions in a less than favorable way, depicting rural villages like St. Petersburg and Dawson’s Landing (both fictional surrogates for the author’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri) and even characters like Aunt Polly, as beset by a conventional piety that does not recognize the world’s sometimes harsh realities. Probably the most ambivalent example of folklore of the day, though, is Twain’s usage of the trickster figure.

Cons and tricks are so ubiquitous in Twain’s writings that a full treatment of his use of the trickster motif (a pattern nearly ubiquitous in folklore worldwide, and American no less so) would require a treatment much longer than the scope of this essay. It will suffice to mention a few notable examples, and to notice how the trickster himself, while often an agent of humor and cheerfulness, can just as often be a figure of guilt and questionable morality.

Huckleberry Finn tricks the town of St. Petersburg into thinking him murdered (echoing Tom Sawyer’s faked death in his own book). Huck tricks Jim with the dead snake in his bed on Jackson’s Island, and later tricks Jim again after their separation in the fog. Tom Sawyer tricks his Aunt Sally into believing he is a stranger, then kisses her and forces her to ask for another kiss when the trick is revealed. Sally herself tricks her own husband when he comes home from looking for Tom. Most troubling, Tom tricks Jim into staying in a false captivity in order to pretend to free him. Of course, this does not touch all the tricks perpetuated on society and individuals by Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by an anonymous stranger in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” by Twain himself and others in Roughing It and The Innocents Abroad, and by the king and duke in Huckleberry Finn. Twain engaged in many trickster activities himself, as he describes in his autobiography.

Just as in folklore, tricksters in Twain can be good-natured and humorous when among friends and children, but can also reveal societal flaws and problematic relationships. As the Canadian literary critic Sacvan Bercovitch notes,

This setting — a new capitalist nation in the violent process of emergence — is a Trickster paradise. Its social and psychological uncertainties, its physical turbulence and shifting borders, make for a world that’s not only ripe for but conducive to all manner of Trickster wiles: transgressing boundaries, defying taboos, mocking rules and regulations.

The ambivalence of certain elements of daytime folklore, though, is quite different from the quality that, I would argue, sets the folklore of the night apart from it. In this strain of folklore Twain employs omens and superstition, ghost stories, and a form of animism regarding the Mississippi River. What binds these folkloric elements in common is fear. Loneliness. Elements of death. An existential quality and a sense of powerlessness against a world that is bigger than Twain’s characters, and over which they have little, if any, control.

The St. Petersburg novels, but especially Huck Finn, are full of omens and superstitions, most of which warn of approaching bad luck and tragedy. From the very first chapters, these omens attempt to make sense of the unpredictability of the world and the invisible forces that govern it. Jim judges the weather from the way birds fly and fears handling snakeskin, while Huck shivers at the spilling of salt, the death of a spider, and the calls of certain night birds, and Pap Finn employs a cross of nails on his bootheel to ward off the devil.

Surprisingly, this is not mere ignorance; these beliefs have real predictive power, foretelling the arrival of Huck’s father, the snakebite Jim suffers, a rainstorm, even Jim obtaining money at the end of the novel. After Huck and Jim are separated in the fog, Jim’s interpretation of the events— even though based on the false belief that they were a dream — actually comes true: he foretells “troubles we was going to get into with quarrelsome people and all kinds of mean folks” (ie, the king and the duke), “but if we minded our business and didn’t talk back and aggravate them,” (Huck and Jim both decide to let the con-men have their way most of the time) “we would pull through and get out of the fog and into the big clear river” (they eventually rid themselves of the grifters).

To a lesser extent, Twain employs ghost stories to add atmosphere and mood to his stories. One of them, found in Life on the Mississippi, tells the origin of a ghost steamboat “still butting around in that deserted river, trying to find her way out.” In another chapter of the same book, Twain quotes a cut passage from Huck Finn, in which a raftsman talks about a “haunted bar’l” that once followed him down the river for a long time until he finally fished it out of the water, only to find it contained the body of a dead baby that one of the other raftsmen had killed. The barrel, it seems, had been following him for years down the river. Twain also wrote another ghost story for Huck Finn that was also ultimately cut, this one from the beginning of chapter nine, in which Jim tells Huck about a revenant that almost strangled him while he was preparing a corpse for his former master, a medical student, to examine.

Perhaps most fascinating, Twain often describes the river itself in personified, almost animistic terms. In Life on the Mississippi he states that it “would neither buoy up a swimmer nor permit a drowned person’s body to rise to the surface,” suggesting an implacable personality that demands tribute and is unwilling to give up what it has claimed. The water is unpredictable, capricious, inexorable, a thing which even the vaunted steamboat pilots Twain so admires must always heed its many faces and moods. It floods, destroys homes, and wrecks riverboats, heedless of the damage it does and which people do to each other along its banks. T.S. Eliot even went so far as to call the Mississippi of the novel a god, and indeed it feels appropriate that omens and superstition are so often employed within the demesne of the river.

* * *

Much has been written about the first strain of folklore in Twain, what I call the folklore of the day. Most readers probably would agree it is more characteristic of his stories, and it certainly mirrors his popular persona: the brazen humorist whose wit and breezy irreverence reflect the soul of a mythical America, that land of possibility and opportunity. It is this flavor of folklore that more people think of when they hear names like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn.

But it is Twain’s use of the folklore of the night that interests me more. Here we see not only a division between “day” and “night”; we also sense a deep, unbridgeable chasm between himself and the world outside of him. Of an existential unease, perhaps even dread, that soaks through his plots and characters alike. There is something in the folklore of the night that demands resolution, catharsis, and consolation, even while offering none of those things in itself.

What, then, is the purpose of this strain? What is the function of fear-based stories? What role do horror and the ghost story play in human art, storytelling, and psychology?

I would argue that they allow us to explore mortality, both literally and figuratively, in a safe context in which one’s self is not actually in peril, in order to achieve peace and acceptance in the face of a sometimes frightening reality. Death is something we all fear; yet it is something none of us can avoid. If we are to live peaceful, meaningful, fulfilling lives, we must all sooner or later come to terms with it.

It is worth taking a moment to look at the cultural roots of this folklore. Many readers, seeing how well-versed Jim is in superstition, might chalk this up to mere slave ignorance, or to his African heritage. Ironically, nearly all the folklore associated with Jim is of European origin, including most of the omens and the concept of being ridden by witches. The main African component of his lore consists of the prophesying hairball, and the general view of nature as filled with ambivalent spirits. The ghost ship also seems to have African resonance; in black folklore, though seldom in white, inanimate objects can have spirits of their own. Snakes are another point of contrast between Huck Finn and African traditions, where they are often creatures of good luck, conferring strength and potency to those who touch them or wear their skins.

But the association with (if not always the actual origins of) the folklore of the night and a black character like Jim makes sense in a way. In Twain, this lore is an expression of powerlessness, and who is more powerless than a slave? Yet it carries emotional resonance for all of us, since we are all powerless to some extent, however we try to convince ourselves otherwise through cultural and social influence, money, or political power. The less privileged — here, slaves and runaways like Jim — are always in more intimate contact with the fundamentally human limitations we all feel on some level.

The horror story, the ghost story, the terrifying omen — in other words, what I call the folklore of the night — all facilitate in the process of acceptance. With the help of such stories, we can undergo a symbolic and sympathetic death, and thereby reconcile ourselves with the world around us, where death is just another part of life.

Just as the folklore of the day is not necessarily good or positive in and of itself, so also the folklore of the night is not necessarily evil or even negative. Death, suffering, and fear are real aspects of the world Twain and his readers live in, so stories employing the folklore of the night are in that sense realistic and can, at the very least, provide opportunities to achieve some degree of growth toward a healthier, more holistic acceptance of our place in the world.

In his book The Immortal Diamond, the mystic Richard Rohr writes of the necessity of this process, in which we let go of the false self and its delusions, resulting in a nondual consciousness in which “life and death are not two but are part of a whole,” allowing one to “view reality in a holistic, undivided way,” where everything has value and relationship to everything else. This is not something anyone can ever be taught. It is something everyone must choose to experience, or not. It is part of the act of letting go. In a nondual consciousness, one sees that division and alienation are only illusions, that nothing real separates one’s self from the universe.

The question is: does Twain do this himself?

It’s impossible, of course, to fully know another person’s inner state, especially if that person is no longer among the living. But a look at some of Twain’s writing, especially certain works produced later in his life, can shed some light on the subject.

My suspicion is that Twain has not got far on this journey, despite his well-trodden path into the folklore of the night. Even though Huckleberry Finn is a novel with a lot of humor, Huck himself rarely laughs or has fun. He is often describe as “in a sweat,” and while he can be an amusing character to the reader, in his own mind stress and uncertainty seem predominant. Further, while modern readers often project a moral victory over racism onto Huck’s crucial decision to “go to hell” for Jim’s sake, Huck doesn’t actually reject racism himself.

It is a sacrificial and highly admirable moment, yes; but it doesn’t seem to change Huck’s basic views about black people. He still quips, “No’m. Killed a nigger,” when asked by Aunt Sally if anyone was hurt when his fictional riverboat blew a cylinder-head, a remark completely extraneous to his cover story. He still feels disappointment at the idea that Tom Sawyer would stoop so low as to steal a slave. He still has no problem — other than that it seems impractical and nonsensical — with putting Jim’s freedom (as far as Huck knows) at risk by indulging Tom’s desire for romanticism. Note that it is here, in this final segment, just when we might expect a moment of synthesis, growth, or acknowledgment of shared belonging between Jim and Huck, that witchlore, a symptom of Jim’s captivity, reappears in the story for the very first time since the opening chapters.

One might expect witchlore to fit in the category of folklore of the night; but again, I draw these categories based on how Twain uses this folklore, not on anything intrinsic to the folklore itself. Earlier in Huck Finn, witchlore is used for comical effect, at Jim’s expense. Here again, though Jim has freed himself and no longer believes in witches, he is forced to pretend that he does. Witchlore, in Huck Finn, belongs to the folklore of the day, and to return to it after the challenges Jim and Huck have faced together strikes a very odd, almost discordant note, as does the entire “evasion”segment of the novel. We as readers often believe we have undergone a broadening experience along with Huck, but it almost feels as if Twain is unaware of it.

Toward the end of his life, Twain wrote numerous stories focused on the figure of Satan. Like witchlore, the folklore of the devil can belong to either the day or the night, depending on how it’s used. There are numerous folktales in which the devil is himself a comical figure, such as the many versions of the bad man who forces Satan to relinquish a claim on his soul by tricking him into climbing inside an inescapable sack. (This story, by the way, is the origin of the Jack O’Lantern, a piece of folklore Huck mentions in chapter sixteen.)

However, in Twain’s stories — “The Chronicles of Young Satan,” “No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger,” “Letters from the Earth,” and possibly even “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” whose titular character remains mysterious and is most notable for his corrosive influence — Satan plays a much more sinister role and serves a purpose that is anything but unifying. These writings spend their energy criticizing humanity, undermining the idea of human goodness, and haranguing against religion. Satan himself, if not a figure of fear or dread like the river in Huck Finn or the ghosts in Life on the Mississippi, is nevertheless disquieting, unnerving.

When Satan casually destroys the miniature, apparently sentient people he creates just for the amusement of himself and three human children in “No. 44,” he blithely tells his mortal companions, “Don’t cry, they were of no value.” Twain’s narrator, young Theodor Fischer, concludes:

It was of no use to try to move him; evidently he was wholly without feeling, and could not understand. He was full of bubbling spirits, and as gay as if this were a wedding instead of a fiendish massacre. And he was bent on making us feel as he did, and of course his magic accomplished his desire.

Satan is almost Lovecraftian in his ability to make humans feel like insignificant gnats on the back of a hostile, incomprehensible and ultimately irrational and senseless power, itself adrift in a blind and meaningless universe.

As Twain comes more into contact with death and loss in his own personal life, he seems to descend more and more into pessimism, nihilism, and rage against the world, humanity, and religion. Rather than acceptance or belonging, the fruits of a mind that has confronted death and fear and come to terms with them in a healthy way, his writing is filled with resentment and alienation and the denial of intrinsic value, goodness, or meaning in humanity or the world in general. Even his own wife lamented his pathological venom. “Why always dwell on the evil until those who live beside you are crushed to the earth and you seem almost like a monomaniac?”

I said earlier that the terminology of “folklore of the day and night” is not intended as a system of judgment or assessment of value. Both night and day contain essential aspects of human experience, and a life lived to the fullest must embrace and include both. Folklore can be both prescriptive and descriptive in its relevance to human life; it records our deepest strivings and most desperate searches, and can, at its best, provide signposts of varying reliability along the way. Mark Twain’s lifelong fascination with and usage of folklore shows that he clearly understood this on some level, for he engaged both elements to great effect in his writing.

Nor is it entirely a judgment to conclude that Twain himself most likely did not get far on the road of synthesis, acceptance, and universal belonging. None of us ever truly completes the journey; each day we must, in a sense, begin it again as if for the first time. And yet there is growth. We can learn from Twain’s own failures, insofar as they are failures, and hopefully surpass his limitations even as we strive to surpass our own.

]]>https://mluce.ro/articles/mark-twain/feed/03420Yokai: The Folklore Roots of Pokémonhttps://mluce.ro/articles/the-yokai-roots-of-pokemon/
https://mluce.ro/articles/the-yokai-roots-of-pokemon/#respondSat, 01 Sep 2018 01:17:56 +0000https://mluce.ro/?p=2841yōkai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore…]]>I’m probably in a minority of Pokémon GO! players, in that I never watched the anime, or played the card game or the many video games while growing up. Only when the Niantic game came out in the summer of 2016 did I have my first real encounter with the world and mythology first created by a Tokyo game developer named Satoshi Tajiri in 1995.

But it wasn’t my first encounter with a certain breed of ghosts and monsters unlike any found elsewhere in the world: yōkai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore.

To define yōkai is like trying to reach out and grasp one: a slippery, ephemeral experience. They can be anything from ghosts to ogres, animal tricksters and shapeshifters, monsters to transformed humans, deities to diseases, even inanimate objects come to life. The folklore of yōkai is ancient, found in folktales and literature, in pop culture and old scrolls and woodblock prints.

And, it turns out, in iPhone AR games.

As ubiquitous as yōkai are, it would be surprising if Pokémon — or any kind of creature / monster mythology of Japanese origin, for that matter — did not incorporate some level of yokai folklore. It’s interesting to notice these origins, whether they’re super obvious like Shiftry and Ninetales, or much subtler like Slowbro and Exeggutor.

I’ve compiled a list of yokai that show up in some form in Pokémon GO!, as the game currently stands, having released four generations of the creatures. I will most likely have to update this list when more Pokémon are added: more likely sooner than later.

For now, this list can serve as an eye-opening glimpse into the macabre world of Japanese folklore for those who haven’t been inducted in the mysteries of yōkai. Or, for those who are already aware of them, an insight into yet another of the myriad ways that yōkai folklore has been adapted, expanded, and explored in the modern age.

* * *

Tengu

Tengu are semi-divine, semi-monstrous creatures that haunt the mountains of Japan. Their form is a blending of human and birdlike features: usually wings, and sometimes beaks. They are often tree-dwellers. Shiftry is based on the dai tengu (“great tengu”), the most powerful and wise of the tengu, which tend to be more human in appearance and less bird-like — although the long, sometimes bulbous nose remains a visible, if symbolic, indicator of their avian nature.

In this form, tengu usually wear the clothing and accessories of the yama-bushi, a type of hermetic Buddhist monk who trains and meditates in the mountains, away from the comforts of civilization. This association is clear in Shiftry’s sandals, which are the single-toothed geta worn by both the yama-bushi and the dai tengu. Another link is Shiftry’s leafy hands, an allusion to the ha-uchiwa (“feather fans”) wielded by tengu as a source of power that controls the winds.

I gave my Shiftry the nickname Sōjōbō, which is traditionally the king of the tengu.

* * *

Kotengu

Though not as obvious as with Shiftry, Nuzleaf is definitely based on the ko tengu (“small tengu”), also called karasu tengu (“crow tengu”), which is the basic, more avian form of the creature. This connection is visible mostly in Nuzleaf’s long, pointed, beak-like nose, and in its relation to Shiftry. Like Nuzleaf, ko tengu is a lower form which only “evolves,” so to speak, after reaching an immense level of age and power.

* * *

Futakuchi Onna

This yokai’s name means “two-mouth woman,” which gives a good idea of what she’s about. Stories about her often begin with pantries that are always bare regardless of how much food has been stored up. After a while someone will discover that one of the women in the house is really a futakuchi onna, who eats normally during meals but at night comes out to raid the house’s stores and eat them with her second, hidden mouth, attached to the back of her skull. Often her long hair will form tendrils that help her feed.

Mawile seems to illustrate these ghostly origins pretty well. In Pokémon GO!, she’s nearly always seen with her back to the player, or to her Pokémon opponents. When battle begins, her long ponytail opens up to reveal a fearsome, gaping jaw.

* * *

Kyubi no Kitsune

While kitsune is the Japanese term for a fox, kyūbi no kitsune is specifically a nine-tailed fox.

The fox itself is such a central figure in Japanese folklore that it’s impossible to do it justice in the scope of a short article. Foxes are among the many animals traditionally believed to be capable of shapeshifting and incredibly long life. As a fox grows older and more powerful, it can grow more tails. The oldest and most powerful foxes have nine. (This progression in power is seen in the evolution of Vulpix, which has only six tails, into Ninetales, which of course has nine.)

The typing of these two Pokémon reflects the Japanese lore that foxes are capable of producing fire (kitsune bi), seen famously in Hiroshige’s famous woodblock print Foxes Meeting at Oji. This is one of the many varieties (in the folklore of cultures worldwide, not just Japanese) of ghostly fire.

* * *

Amikiri

This one is pretty obvious, since they are visually so similar: the segmented body and tail, the two clawed arms, the lack of legs, and flying as the primary means of transportation. Oddly, amikiri have a penchant for using their claws to cut nets, which is actually the literal meaning of their name.

* * *

Sazae Oni

Slowbro is less obvious. While its main component, the vacuous pink bear, seems to bear little resemblance to the horrifying seashell woman of Japanese folklore, the real connection is the shell itself. Slowbro’s tail-eating shell is a spiraling chamber covered with spikes, just like the sazae snail (Turbo cornutus) that the yokai is based on. Slowbro’s water typing also suggests a connection with sazae oni, which of course is a type of water demon.

* * *

Baku

A legendary being based on the tapir, a real animal native to Asia, the baku is known as the eater of dreams. Generally a positive creature, it can be summoned by children to either avoid nightmares, or to devour ones that one has just awakened from. It’s thought to be a symbol of good luck, guardianship, and protection of the weak.

A darker side to the baku is seen in in lore that if it is summoned too often it can devour hopes and dreams as well as nightmares, if it remains hungry enough afterward.

Either way, it’s easy to see how both baku and Drowzee are based on the tapir, and why Drowzee has a psychic typing.

* * *

Jinmenju

Jinmenju, or ninmenju, are trees that have human heads for fruits, which are capable of smiling and laughter. The heads continue to laugh even after they fall from the tree itself, an image which parallels the official Pokémon lore that Exeggcute is formed from heads that have fallen from Exeggutor.

If you doubt that Exeggutor comes from the jinmenju, take a look at Shigeru Mizuki’s illustration of this yokai. It’s pretty hard to deny the resemblence there.

The fact that Exeggutor takes the form of a palm tree, specifically, is fitting when you consider that the folklore behind these trees originally comes from the Arab world. The fruit of the jinmenju is also said to be both sweet and sour.

* * *

Yamanba

This one may not be as obvious, as Jynx bears more superficial resemblance to certain stereotypically racist depictions of black women than to an old mountain hag. But Google “yamanba fashion” and you’ll start to see the connection. This trend usually involves artificially darkening one’s skin — in a very blatant way, not simply a spray-on tan — as well as lighter hair and colorful makeup, all of which upend traditional Japanese beauty ideals of the pale, dark-haired woman. It’s this inversion of the ideal that forms the connection between yamanba fashion (and Jynx’s appearance) and the yokai which served as its namesake.

Yamanba are old hags that live in the mountains of Japan. If a traveler comes upon its lonely hut, it will invite them in and give them hospitality, only to reveal their true nature when their guests fall asleep and are at the yamanba’s mercy.

* * *

Nekomata

As with the fox and many other animals, cats in Japanese folklore can have supernatural abilities if they are old and powerful enough. Yōkai cats, called bakeneko generically, can be benign creatures; but nekomata in particular are often hostile. They can generate fire, control corpses, and even kill and devour humans.

The distinct feature of the nekomata is its split tail, and this is where the connection to Espeon comes in. While Espeon (and the rest of the Eeveelution family) is not necessarily feline in nature, Espeon specifically has the dual tail, suggesting a similar kind of acquired power to the bakeneko and nekomata — appropriate for its psychic typing.

* * *

Kama Itachi

Kama itachi, literally “sickle weasels,” live in cold, mountainous places where they travel in threes and form whirlwinds, attacking people as they pass, then using a magical salve to heal the wounds they have caused. This yōkai is probably an explanation for the way a cold, icy wind feels like it cuts one’s skin even though no apparent damage has been done.

Sneasel is, of course, a weasel with very prominent (if not exactly sickle-like) claws, reflecting the typical depiction of kama itachi in folk art. Even the name Sneasel, a portmanteau of “sneeze” and “weasel,” suggests a connection with wind that is appropriate for the kama itachi, as is the Pokémon’s ice typing.

* * *

Chochin Obake

Chochin Obake is a tsukumogami, a type of yōkai which was once an inanimate object, now come to life after being thrown away or improperly respected. Here, the object in question is a lantern.

The chochin obake in the art above (which actually depicts three different types of tsukumogami) is the hanging lantern in the top right corner.

Though Duskull resembles the chochin obake’s basic shape more, Dusclops is clearly the closer in overall looks. Duskull, with its single eye of flame (even though there are two eye holes, it’s clear there’s only one tongue of fire behind them), is quite clearly a lantern. The connection to Dusclops is seen in the single eye and the horizontally-striped body, reminiscent of Japanese paper lanterns.

* * *

Kirin

Despite the lack of visual similarity, Suicune’s official description contains some clear links to its kirin roots.

Suicune embodies the compassion of a pure spring of water. It runs across the land with gracefulness. This Pokémon has the power to purify dirty water.

Kirin, which is based on a Chinese legendary animal, is a creature of holiness, goodness, and purity. It is so gentle, in fact, that it floats through the air rather than walk on the ground, having too much compassion to injure even a single blade of grass.

Though Suicune is one of the Legendary Dogs, while kirin are usually portrayed with more of a deerlike form, both creatures possess horns or antlers, and the kirin’s flowing tail and mane could be the inspiration for Suicune’s undulating white tails.

* * *

Yuki Warashi / Yukinbo

A less commonly known yōkai , yuki warashi or yukinbo are both names that essentially mean “snow child.” However, the two names go with two different stories. Yuki warashi is a child-sized snowman built by an old, lonely, childless couple, which comes to life, lives with them in happiness, then melts when spring comes. Yukinbo, however, is a one-legged yōkai who hops in circles around trees, explaining the natural phenomenon of why tree wells form.

These yōkai appear as pale children wearing traditional snow jackets made of straw, which have pointed hoods so that the snow cannot build up on top of them. This is one relationship that’s quite apparent, at least visually.

* * *

Kappa

As kappa are among the most iconic yōkai out there, it’s a little surprising that there wasn’t a kappa-inspired Pokémon until Generation 3. Green-skinned, with the body of a child and the beak and shell of a turtle, kappa are river creatures whose interactions with people are ambivalent at best. They will often drown children and eat them, but they like cucumbers, too, which may sometimes placate them if you have one handy.

The lilypad-like dish atop Lombre’s head is a reference to a key aspect of kappa lore. These yōkai have a bowl-like impression on the top of their heads which they must always keep filled with water, the source of their power. Kappa can be defeated if you bow to them, since they have to return the gesture, causing the water from their head dish to spill, and thus making them nearly helpless. Every stage of this Pokémon’s evolution cycle — Lotad, Lombre, and Ludicolo — has some kind of a dishlike head feature.

* * *

Hakutaku

Another creature based in Chinese mythology, the hakutaku is a monstrous nine-eyed ox that lives in the mountains, with horns and a second face embedded in each of its sides. They are good and holy creatures and only appear when a good ruler is in power. Hakutaku are thought to be all-knowing. In one story, a hakutaku warned of a coming plague and provided talismans against the disease.

Not only does Absol bear a strong resemblance to the hakutaku, its official description borrows heavily from the yōkai’s lore: “Every time Absol appears before people, it is followed by a disaster such as an earthquake or a tidal wave.” Though this is a reversal of the hakutaku — suggesting Absol has a role in causing disaster, rather than warning against it — the connection nonetheless seems pretty clear.

* * *

Ho-o

It’s pretty hard to argue that Ho-Oh isn’t based on the hō-ō, or hōō(same pronunciation, just different romanizations). It’s quite literally right there in the name. Yet another originally Chinese creature, the hō-ō is a sacred bird associated with fire, the sun, and the Japanese imperial family. Just as Ho-Oh is said to bring happiness to those who encounter it, the sight of a hō-ō is a good omen, portending peace, prosperity, and justice in the land. It is never seen during times of conflict. Like kirin, the hō-ō refuses to harm any living thing, and only eats bamboo seeds.

The hō-ō represents duality, the balance and flow of yin and yang. While Ho-Oh itself contains no echo of this lore, it is often paired with another Pokémon, Lugia, which is a being of water and night — in many ways the exact reverse of Ho-Oh. One might say, the yin to Ho-Oh’s yang.

* * *

Tsuchinoko

Another Pokémon whose appearance seems to have been borrowed whole-cloth from yōkai lore, Dunsparce has a legless body and tiny wings. While tsuchinoko‘s appendages seem more like flippers than wings, the link is still clear. These snakelike yōkai have bodies that are fatter in the middle, with a tapering tail and a discernible neck. This basic structure is apparent in the segmented Dunsparce as well.

The usual translation of tsuchinoko’s name is “earth child,” which makes sense as snakes slither on the ground; but an alternate meaning is “hammer child,” perhaps suggesting another link to Dunsparce, whose tail is apparently a drill.

* * *

Tatsu

While Rayquaza is also based on the Hebrew monster called Ziz, its appearance clearly also draws on the Eastern dragon, or tatsu. In countries like China and Japan, dragons are not creatures of fire, but of water and air, and are known not for their villainy as in the west, but for their great wisdom. They also appear more like serpents than giant winged lizards, and often have no wings at all, whether they fly or not.

Rayquaza is part of the Weather Trio or Elemental Trio: Groudon governs the earth, Kyogre the water, and Rayquaza controls the air. Dragons are often believed to dwell in the heavens, as they are creatures of order, so Rayquaza’s atmospheric dominion isn’t surprising.

* * *

Wani

Much like Rayquaza, Gyarados is based on the Sino-Japanese image of the dragon. Where Rayquaza reflects the dragon’s air aspects, Gyarados reflects its water aspects. (Again, dragons in the East are not typically not creatures of fire.) The fact that it takes 500 candies to evolve a Magikarp to a Gyarados in the game also hints toward the dragon’s immense level of age, power, and wisdom in Japanese folklore.

Wani are dragonlike sea monsters. One of the most famous is the Dragon King, Ryūjin, who rules the palace at the bottom of the sea where Urashima Tarō is taken in a popular Japanese folktale.

* * *

Basan

Basanare large, chicken-like birds found only in Shikoku in Japan. They breathe fire and only eat charred wood and embers, especially from bonfires, although they shun the company of humans.

All of which draws a pretty clear arrow to Magmar, a fire type chicken-like Pokémon rarely seen in the game, whose head and tail give off flames of their own.

* * *

Tanuki

Zigzagoon is a small and common Generation 3 Pokémon with bushy fur and mask-like markings around its eyes. While its name might suggest a closer link to the raccoon, the official Japanese description of Zigzagoon is mame danuki, the name for a type of small tanuki which covers itself in its massive, expanding scrotum in order to shapeshift — or sometimes just to get out of the rain.

Along with the tengu and kappa, tanuki are among the most well-known of all yōkai, probably due to their trickster nature and ability to transform into an unlimited number of forms, from humans to giants and monsters, and sometimes even inanimate objects like teapots. According to folklore, they have voracious appetites and a weakness for sake (perhaps why Zigzagoon can’t seem to travel in a straight line?).

The tanuki is actually a real animal (Nyctereutes procyonoides viverrinus), often appearing in older translations of stories as “raccoon” or “badger,” though it is neither; it’s actually a member of the dog family.

* * *

Ungaikyo

Bronzor, a steel type Pokémon from Generation 4, is shaped like an ancient Japanese bronze mirror. Its glowing eyes are a reference to the ungaikyō, a type of tsukumogami in which a mirror has attained a spirit of its own. This spirit will reveal the true forms of monsters and transformed animals such as foxes, if they look into the mirror while in human form. Ungaikyō are known to reflect monstrous forms of ordinary people, too, so they’re not all that reliable. The ungaikyō can also be used to trap spirits who look into it.

* * *

Yuki Onna

Froslass evolves from a female Snorunt, which is based on the yokai called yukinbo (see above), so it makes sense that this Pokemon would be connected with a yokai as well. Its Japanese name, Yukimenoko, means “snow girl,” a clear link to the yuki onna, which means “snow woman.” Froslass also has an ice/ghost typing, which is pretty much exactly what you’d expect for a yuki onna.

Yuki onna are female spirits of the snow. They are likely to appear on roads in the mountains during winter, and if they meet a traveler, especially a male, they will suck the life force from his mouth, leaving him frozen solid.

Many stories of the yuki onna involve them assuming a human form (the same as their true form, only minus the ice cold skin) and marrying a human man, a marriage which is often short-lived. She will either melt, turn to an icy mist, or leave her husband when he tells her secret.

Most of the illustrations used in this article are by Matthew Meyer, whose website, Yokai.com, is a highly-recommended, thoroughly-researched guide to the monsters, ghosts, and creatures of Japanese folklore. Used with permission of the artist.

]]>https://mluce.ro/articles/the-yokai-roots-of-pokemon/feed/02841Constellationhttps://mluce.ro/stories/constellation/
Tue, 12 Dec 2017 02:18:35 +0000https://mluce.ro/?p=2037It was a sound he might have heard any night on the edge of the woods, machete in hand, bent from cutting bamboo from the slope beyond the highway. It might have been one of his: a tall, lissome stalk falling, heavy with summer dew. A branch from a tree, maybe, further in. That kind of sound. A forest sound. Not much odd about it.

The glow, though. That caught his eye. He saw it down in the undergrowth a few yards away, faint and white, as he straightened to wipe his brow. A little quarter-sized moon, like the one in the sky — but here, no longer distant.

Ellis went to it. It wasn’t easy, as no Lowcountry forest ever was, choked by vines and branches and orb-weaver webs. By the time he was near enough to reach for it, he could tell what it was. An iPhone, unlocked, a blank white screen displayed. His eyes watered as he took in its sole report: The page could not load because the connection was lost.

“Ellis,” a voice spoke, and he knew it. “Ellis. Ellis. Ellis.”

He could see her now, too, lying in the halo cast by the phone — hers, he assumed. He rubbed his neck, stiff and cramped from craning to watch the highway for police lights. Sara Nilsson. Among the last names he would expect to cross his mind now, after so many years. Which was stranger, he wondered. Seeing her in this place, at this time, and in this situation — or seeing her again in this town, in this state?

“Ellis,” she murmured again. Her head shifted on the pine needle carpet. “Ellis, Ellis, Ellis, Ellis.”

“Damn it,” he said.

Ellis had planned for many situations he might face in the dark off the highway. He had a plan for if a cop pulled over, a plan for if a car broke down nearby, a plan for meeting hitchhikers or wandering homeless, or for if it rained, if it flooded. He had no plan for this.

“Damn it,” he tried again. It didn’t help.

Sara grew still and did not speak again. He wanted to call 911, but then he’d have to explain why he was here, cutting raw material for his sculptures — which he wasn’t entirely sure was legal. He could leave her alone, let the ambulance find her when they arrived; but that didn’t sit well, either.

Only one option, then. He didn’t like it, but there was nothing else left to do.

* * *

When Sara woke she was strapped into the passenger seat of someone’s car. She drew a rattled breath, taking in everything around her in a moment or two. Ellis driving, the dashboard’s dull red glow, the stack of hewn green poles leaning between the two seats from the back. The broken ends of a few had caught in her tousled hair, and she wrenched her head away, not thinking. “Oww,” she growled.

Ellis stared at her, then looked ahead at the road. Something in him made her feel like he was afraid, or at least unsettled. She wasn’t. Not afraid, or even surprised. She wondered briefly why that should be, then shrugged it away.

“You were calling for me,” Ellis said, relief apparent in his voice.

“I was?”

“You said my name.”

Sara frowned. “I don’t remember. Where…?” She looked out at the exit signs sweeping by them, their sentinel green reassuring against the dark.

“Twenty-six. I couldn’t leave you there. You were in the woods, by the shoulder.”

“Where you were getting all of that,” she said, and gestured behind them.

“I use it for my pieces,” Ellis frowned. “You were saying it over and over. Back there. My name.”

Sara winced and said nothing. She remembered some of it now, though not all. There had been a party. And wine. Glass after glass of irony-laced rosé. The faces blurred in her mind — even her own ex’s, who had shadowed her the night long despite her clear disinterest — till they became Ellis’s blurred face, standing over her in the bamboo grove. But no…the party was in Austin, in a trendy loft looking east over the river. Now she was here, a thousand miles away, with Ellis.

She checked her phone. It was the same day, Friday night, mere hours since she had watched the first stars gathering, wondering why she had come to the party. So. She hadn’t lost much time.

“If you’re asking why it was you who found me,” she spoke slowly, “I don’t think I have an answer for that.”

Ellis shifted in his seat and rubbed his neck. He shot her a careful look, and she flushed. That was not at all what he’d been asking. So why had she said that? Where had it come from? She was aware of something in the back of her mind, some process that was in motion within her, or around her, that she couldn’t put words to, or even feelings to. Something that was supposed to happen. She sucked in her lower lip, then bit down.

“Sara,” Ellis said after a while. “You seem really, really calm.”

“Do I?”

“For someone who was just out in the cold, in the woods, alone, well past two.”

She smiled. There was nothing frightening about the woods, or the night. There never had been, to her. The night was something she had always reveled in, an infinite ocean that pulled at her with tides of its own.

When she looked at Ellis again he was distracted, his thought miles away. His head shook slowly and his eyes glimmered with light from the endless stream of reflectors on the road. “What were you doing there by the highway?” he blurted. “What happened to you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Sara peered away out her window. Her eyes flickered up past the treeline, into the sky. “But I know where I need to go now.”

* * *

Ellis relaxed his grip on the wheel and took a breath. He’d been driving in a trance for a while, barely thinking of where they would go. An odd sensation crept over him as she turned and met his eyes: he hadn’t seen Sara in over a decade, or thought about her in nearly as long, but it felt as if they’d been doing this together — making this same drive — many times over many nights and for many years.

“Okay,” he said. “Where is that?”

“East.”

Ellis shook his head, more in wonder now than bewilderment. Part of him realized that he would drive her anywhere, for as long as it would take. That part of him knew it, and wished it were otherwise.

Had she known, back then, how he felt about her? About the torch he had born all those years, through middle and high school? Once he believed she could read him clearly, that his feelings were scrawled in deep red on his face when she was near. But he never knew. There was thrill and terror in a crush, but no certainty.

“…why it was you who found me…”

Ellis winced. Why had she said that?

It didn’t matter. If he’d felt a connection between them once, he’d decided long ago that it was not real, never had been. Any link he’d seen was only because he’d wanted it to be here. And that was still true; whatever was happening now with Sara, there was no purpose or meaning in it. It was a fluke that she’d even recognized him at all back there by the highway, or remembered his name. Whatever the case, she was here now. Wanting to go east.

“Okay,” he said again. “But I have to refuel first.”

Sara smiled and nodded, pleased.

Ellis pulled off the interstate and watched for places that were open. It was harder to see now; there were few streetlights this exit, and stop signs seemed to leap out at him from nowhere. His brake foot was getting itchy. “There,” Sara pointed left, and he saw the Hess station, too.

Ellis offered to buy coffee but she waved him off. He left her inside the Element, glad to be alone for a moment. He reached for his wallet, then stopped. A sign was taped to the pump, scrawled in a feathery hand in red Sharpie: CARD READER DOWN PLEASE PAY AT REGISTER. Ellis sighed.

He’d only walked a pace or two toward the building when it hit him. He hadn’t noticed before, but there were two of them. Two gas stations, one right next to the other. The Hess, full of people and gas and machine errors. The other, dark and forlorn. Empty. The ruins of a gas station, its name now illegible on the sun-bleached, rust-embellished sign. They were twinned, in a way. One thriving, but all exterior and shine, no heart inside. The other full of wear and age and character, but all nostalgia, no soul inside.

Something in Ellis wavered. He couldn’t think or move or blink. Somehow he had lost the quality of contrast — it was hard to tell which of the two he needed to pay. His temples pulsed, something throbbed behind his eyes, and then it passed. Ellis swore.

“Did you get it?” Sara asked when he climbed into the driver’s seat again.

“Yeah, filled it up. Cost me almost—”

“No. Not the gas.”

He froze. Sara’s eyes glimmered, and Ellis stared into them. It was the most unnerved she had been so far, and that, more than anything else so far, unsettled him.

“You missed it, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Missed…what now?”

Her eyes squeezed a moment. Then she stared straight ahead. Ellis tried to read her, but that had grown no easier. Something seemed to have rattled her, but he wasn’t sure.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said at last. “We have to keep going.”

“East?”

Sara nodded. “East.”

So they went east.

* * *

Sara watched and listened. They were close now, though she still wasn’t sure to what. But she could feel it. They were drawing near — or it was drawing near to them, maybe. She didn’t know.

But they were close. Whatever was happening to her, the thing that was supposed to happen, it was almost here.

Ellis filled the drive with small talk. Of his dead-end job as a parking attendant, of how he only felt release in his craft, working the poles till they curved and arced into graceful loops and swirls, taking on density and body and mass. Of their school days together and his memories of her, glimpses into her past that she herself had long ago forgotten. She was grateful for it, even if she only half listened. At times she could see his words begin to shift from sound to image and flicker in her mind. She saw things not as she remembered them, but as he did.

* * *

When Ellis ran out of words he glanced at her. They came to a stoplight and he let go of the wheel, suddenly aware of her in an altered way. Of the immensity of her silence, and the reality of her form, the fullness of her presence. The parts of her that had aged and the parts that seemed almost ageless.

“Do you ever wish you could go back?” she asked, and he nearly jumped, startled.

“Back? To what?”

“Being close to things. Having perspective, but being near enough not to if you decide you don’t want to.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about, but he could almost feel it. Or thought that he could. The car idled, waiting for his foot to leave the brake, but Ellis held it there, willing the light not to change. All of the feeling he’d once had for her, all the dreams of her love, were by now embers long cold, ashes long dispersed. But something else was at work. He was rushing eastward down a road he thought he knew, one he’d driven innumerable times. But now the road had caught him and was pulling him in its flow. A river is never the same river twice. A road is never the same road twice.

* * *

“What happened to you?” Ellis asked her again, almost pleading.

“I don’t know,” she said. He caught her eye and she saw something new there, and knew her answer was not enough. “There was a guy. In Austin, and we were living together. People have always depended on me, Ellis. And things got too…” She drew in a deep breath, not knowing if she should draw it out or rush through it. “I got out of my depth. And I realized that I was happy, but…now it was me who depended on him. It scared me, and, I — I left him. I ran away. Then things were good for a while, for more than a while, about a year. Year and half. Then I had the dreams. And I couldn’t get back. Back to where I should have been.”

Ellis took it all in. He didn’t speak, only listened, as if searching inside of her for something, wondering. Her voice cracked. “The connection was lost,” she said.

“Connection?” he finally spoke. “To what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and this time she meant it. “I don’t feel like myself anymore.” She paused. “Maybe I’m not.”

The light went green, but Ellis didn’t move. She waited for him to speak.

“I don’t know, Sara,” he said. His voice was heavy in a way she hadn’t expected. “I don’t know, but I can tell you one thing. I can’t think about things in that way. I used to. God, I used to obsess about things like that, back when we were in school. Who I really was. Trying to figure myself out. But at some point you just have to stop.” He met her eyes again. “I don’t think what you do is a function of who you are. I think it’s the other way around.”

The light turned yellow again, then red. Sara sighed. The part of her that was waiting, expectant, for the thing that was supposed to happen, that part of her grew restless, eager to begin. But a stronger part of her didn’t want it to. Whatever had done this to her, whatever had brought her here, wherever she’d come from — she didn’t want all of this to end. However she’d ended up in that grove, delirious, not knowing herself, but knowing him.

“And now you’re going…where? East? And what will you do then?”

“I couldn’t explain it,” her brow furrowed. “Not in a way you’d understand. Or maybe you would, but I wouldn’t.”

“I think, though,” she said after a moment. “Wherever it is I need go…I think I’ve been there before.”

* * *

Nearly two hours had passed since he had found her in the woods. He had brought her nearly as far east as they could go, had crossed the bridge to the last island before the sea.

“This is far enough,” Sara said, and he pulled the Element into the gravel lot of a little Catholic church. He walked with her the rest of the way.

The road was sand-strewn and leaf-scattered, and cracked in places. Wayward runners of grass filled the gaps where they could. Ellis kept his eyes straight ahead. He felt, but could not hear, Sara walking beside him.

The island was mostly unlit, but the night seemed not as dark. Was it that early already? More likely, the light of stars no longer had the city to compete with. Soon there was no more road, only beach and a last row of beach houses. He wanted her to stop, wanted to speak one final word to her, but had no idea what to say.

Ellis halted but Sara went on over the sand, and turned to follow the line of the shore. Waves soughed and sighed, their sound empty without the cries of shorebirds. The breeze blew salt into his nose and throat.

Sara walked a short way then turned to climb the stairs of one of the beach houses. It was tall and round, set on high stilts, wreathed in double porches. He watched as she waited at the door and did not knock. A light came on inside.

The door opened and he thought she went through it, but then it closed and the light went out again, and he wondered if he had really seen it, if she had really gone. The house’s round roof seemed to gaze upward, as if searching for answers of its own. The closing felt permanent, irrevocable. But Ellis felt relieved. Things had slipped back into themselves again, the spell — whatever it was — broken. The needle had slipped into its groove.

He turned and walked the long way back to his car beneath the same moon that had cast its bright face on the ocean’s rind, echoing on shoreward. And a thought took shape in his mind, that the moon, too, is a kind of road.

]]>2037‘Fighting the Long Defeat’ : Nature and Grief in Tolkien and Medieval Poetryhttps://mluce.ro/articles/longdefeat/
Fri, 17 Nov 2017 21:44:27 +0000https://mluce.ro/?p=1964The Lord of the Rings, medieval ideas of nature — from its decline and hostility to culture, to its own suffering alongside us — color Tolkien's writing, where they ultimately develop into a reconciliation between wilderness and hearth…]]>A version of this paper was presented at the Southeastern Medieval Association Conference on November 17, 2017, at the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston, SC.

J.R.R. Tolkien once claimed that he would “take the part of trees as against all their enemies” (Letters #339). Nature, especially trees and forests, holds a central place in his works, its highest expression being the Two Trees of Valinor, from the roots of which all his stories stem. His shameless love of nature might suggest a simplistic, idyllic, and glorified depiction in his works, but this could not be further from the truth. As an Oxford professor of Old and Middle English, his work on poems like Beowulf, “The Wanderer,” and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, profoundly influenced his fictional works. Especially in The Lord of the Rings, the medieval ideas of nature’s decline and hostility to human culture often color the story’s mood; but he also explores the idea, incipient in medieval poetry, that nature too suffers with us, and develops this into an ethic of reconciliation between wilderness and hearth.

The fact that reconciliation is sorely needed is clear in medieval poetry. Though it is true, as Gillian Rudd observes, that the agency of containing and othering nature lies in human hands (55), the sense that medieval poets were responding to an otherness that they actually perceived (whether it exists from an objective standpoint or not) is found throughout the poetry of the age. Wild places, particularly forests, are often completely outside of human control, and are often the sites of otherworldly encounters. Only after passing through the wild forest of Wirral does Gawain encounter the castle of the Green Knight and Morgan le Fay. “The Wirral,” Rudd asserts, “is thus finely balanced between actual geographical place and archetypal forest of romance text: a place of personal trial” (57). Emphasizing its otherness, it is also “the parallel world of ‘faerie’ that exists in romance” (59), for there are not only animals and wildmen there, but also giants (“etaynes” in the poem, line 723) and possibly dragons.

In Tolkien, the forest realm of Lothlórien can play either role in the human / nature dichotomy. Home to an elven enclave, it is a decidedly otherworldly place, one feared by the men of Rohan who live south of its borders. Even Faramir, heir to the stewardship of Gondor and more well-educated than most humans, admits that his people have come to “speak of the Golden Wood with dread” (IV.5). Like the Wirral in Sir Gawain, Lórien is a real, physical place that borders human lands, but it is also a mythical place, a strange fairyland through which few pass unchanged. More strikingly, the trees of the Old Forest actively resent humans for their mobility and tendency to cut wood for fire; and the peak of Caradhras in the Misty Mountains hurls snow and malice at any who would tread its slopes. Nature, in both medieval poetry and in Tolkien, is thus linked with the supernatural and often bears hostility to humans, who pass its boundaries only at their peril.

The threat of nature, as seen in Anglo-Saxon elegies like “The Wanderer,” is to embody the transience of all human things, because nature itself is inherently temporal and entropic. The poet laments the loss of his lord and kinsmen, a loss due to the fact that “this middle-earth / droops and decays every single day” (lines 62-63). And not just in his home, but “All is toilsome in the earthly kingdom, / the working of wyrdchanges the world under heaven” (106-107). Though ultimate loss has not yet occurred in “The Seafarer,” another elegy from the same collection, Martin Green has observed how “the imagery of the cycles of nature, the never-ending pattern of spring following winter, [suggests] that time is not cyclic and static but linear and transitory. . . . the speech turns from a celebration of renewal and continuity to a lament over decline and decay.” The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight similarly observes, after describing the passage of seasons, that “winter returns, as is the way of the world / through time” (530-531). His ending and emphasis on winter seems to echo and reinforce the icy loneliness of the elegies.

Closely linked to the theme of nature’s trend toward decline is the sense that human culture is besieged by nature. The “Wanderer” poet’s lament that “throughout this middle-earth / walls stand blasted by wind, / beaten by frost, the buildings crumbling” (75-77) is doubly striking, given that the mead-hall’s destruction is not merely the physical loss of property and of the glory of human craftsmanship, but also of the social center of their culture, so in a real sense its ruin is also their own.

Thus, when stretched across time, the perception of nature’s decline takes the shape of a belief in the fading of society.

The opening lines in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight trace Britain’s founding to Felix Brutus and the ruin of Troy, an origin that not only glorifies Britain, but also casts a pessimistic shadow on its future, foreshadowing the fall and death of Arthur. The Golden Age of Camelot, after all, has already long ended by the poet’s time. This pessimism is even starker at the end of Beowulf, where the hero’s death has enabled the Geats as a nation to pass away, a development which, again, has already happened from the poet’s perspective in time. Both poets, then, look back to a lost glory with the desolate longing of wanderers and seafarers.

The Lord of the Rings is practically drenched in this sense of decline. Despite their otherworldliness, the elves of Lothlórien are no less subject to entropy. They have lost much already, and mourn for what they know they will lose. At first glance, the realm appears, if anything, a place untouched by time. “It seemed to [Frodo] that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. . . . [T]he shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever.” Not even the seasons flow as they should: “in the autumn [the] leaves fall not, but turn to gold. Not till the spring comes and the new green opens do they fall, and then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers. . . . In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring” (II.6).

These conditions are far from permanent, though. Galadriel explains to Frodo that she uses one of the Elven Rings of Power to create this timelessness. If Frodo fails to destroy the One Ring that rules them all, then all of Middle-earth will fall to the enemy, including her realm; but even his success will result in nullifying the Elven Rings, and therefore the end of Lothlórien as she has known it. In a line that encapsulates the sadness of the Elves in the face of time, she laments that “together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat” (II.7). Not defeat at the hands of Sauron, the dark lord, but at the hands of time and nature. This is what it means to live in Middle-earth, even for the immortal elves: enduring the fading and loss that are part of this mortal world.

Even in Tolkien’s human cultures, the loss of a golden age is commonly felt. The men of Rohan, whose speech Tolkien even translates into Old English, have been called by Tom Shippey “Anglo-Saxons on horses,” a link which is most obvious in one of their poems, based heavily on lines 93-96 of “The Wanderer,” the archetypal ubisunt passage:

To the Rohirrim and the Anglo-Saxons alike, human culture and glory fades in the hands of time and nature. Harps, horns, and crops burn away like dead wood and are eroded by the seaward flow of rivers.

In Gondor, whose people were once the wisest and most powerful and enlightened humans in Middle-earth, the loss is even more apparent. The realm still has beauty and glory, and its capital is “vaster and more splendid than anything [one of its visitors] had dreamed of”; but Tolkien emphasizes much more the things that the city has lost.

…it was in truth falling year by year into decay; and already it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there. In every street they passed some great house or court . . . whose doors and arched gates . . . were silent, and no footsteps rang on their wide pavements, nor voice was heard in their halls, nor any face looked out from door or empty window. (Tolkien, Rings 752)

Rings V.1

But even at the apex of Gondorian glory, this realm was itself only a faded version of Númenor (Tolkien’s version of Atlantis), and was founded by a remnant who (like Felix Brutus and his men in Sir Gawain) alone survived the destruction of their home and arrived in their new lands as exiles.

Middle-earth is rife with such faded kingdoms whose glory will never return, and indeed Middle-earth itself has been greatly diminished by the time of The Lord of the Rings, having first lost the entire subcontinent of Beleriand, then the island of Númenor. Within Middle-earth, the forest of Fangorn once “was just the East End” (III.4) of a broader wood, as is the Old Forest on the borders of the Shire.

Despite their sense of nature’s otherness, hostility, and inevitable decline, medieval poets also show in it glimpses of empathy to human suffering. It is probably too far a stretch to say that nature mourns with us in these poems, but it is clear that nature, too, participates in the pain of its own decay and decline. As Jeffrey Cohen reminds us, sometimes nature “is deployed as a meditation on the burdens of human identity.” Seabirds express the loneliness of “The Wanderer”’s narrator, who has only “the wild swan’s song / . . . , the gannet’s call / and the curlew’s cry for the laughter of men” (lines 19-21). The birds show no direct empathy to the wanderer himself, but they nonetheless suffer the same hardships: terns plea before storms, and frost-laden eagles scream in the cold. (23-24). Cohen also points to the way in which trees, vines, and birds express Sir Gawain’s own gloom as he approaches the Green Chapel, lost and bewildered, in lines 744-747 of the poem:

Hazel and hawthorn are interwoven; decked and draped in damp, shaggy moss, and bedraggled birds on bare, black branches pipe pitifully into the piercing cold.

The Beowulf poet similarly evokes the fear and dread of Grendel not by describing how terrified the Danes of Heorot are of him, but by describing the lonely gloom through which he travels, marshes and heaths that are made desolate by his presence (lines 103-104). He comes “In off the moors, down through the mist bands” (710), “Under the cloud-murk” (714), and, defeated by Beowulf, he slinks off “under the fen-banks . . . / to his desolate lair” (819-820).

The watery gloom continues when Beowulf and the Danes travel to that lair in search of Grendel’s mother. The lair is found near “windswept crags / and treacherous keshes [log bridges], where cold streams / pour down the mountain and disappear / under mist and moorland” (1358-1361), and the warriors’ path leads “up fells and screes, along narrow footpaths” (1410), through a “dismal wood” (1414) and out to a “bloodshot water” (1416).

It is not merely nature that is hostile here. Nature itself, as much as the Danes, suffers from the monsters’ presence, and its suffering is expressed parallel to theirs. Through landscape, the poet paints an emotional image of despair, foreboding, and loneliness that not only mirrors the mood of the characters, but also of the poet’s audience and us as readers. Significantly, when Beowulf finally kills Grendel’s mother, the bleakness seems to have vanished from the landscape. They return, we are told, “With high hearts . . . / along footpaths and trails through the fields, roads that they knew” (1632-1634). The atmosphere has become one of familiarity and ease, and their biggest worry now is the weight of Grendel’s mother’s head.

In Tolkien, Nature suffers most evidently in the Ents, a giant arboreal race who act as shepherds of the trees. Their thoughts are the thoughts of a forest, and their main representative, Treebeard, gives voice to the forest’s pain and resentment: “Many of those [felled] trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves” (Rings﻿ III.4). It is not hard to see, in the vanished voices of the forest, echoes of the wanderer’s ruined hall and its lost warriors.

Nor are the Ents any less subject to the inevitable loss of their culture. They have lost their women long ago, the Entwives, and therefore the ability to restore their ranks. “Forests may grow,” Treebeard grieves, “Woods may spread. But not Ents. There are no Entings” (VI.6). In his slow, booming speech, nature is given a quite literal voice, and with it, proclaims the wanderer’s same grief.

Tolkien clearly empathizes with medieval poets’ views of nature; but he also attempts to develop these themes, often finding in these sorrows a testing ground and a source of growth. Galadriel’s motivation, Tolkien explains in a letter, stems from an essentially Elven perspective. They viewed change “as a regrettable thing”, and were

obsessed with ‘fading’, the mode in which…time (the law of the world under the sun) was perceived by them. They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming — even though they also retained the old motive of their kind, the adornment of earth and the healing of its hurts.

(Letters #131)

While this is noble, it is also problematic. As Lucas Niiler points out, often those who wish to enjoy nature even for its own qualities still, in doing so, view it as a commodity.

Galadriel’s wish to preserve her land’s beauty, after all, is a resistance to “the law of the world under the sun,” an effort to elevate her own desires and preferences above nature’s own tendencies. She wishes for “trees and grass…that do not die — here in the land that is mine” (Tales 250, emphasis added), a line that betrays her possessive and somewhat paternalistic view of the natural world.

Her moment of truth comes when Frodo offers her the One Ring, and in doing so unknowingly tests her. “For many long years,” she says, “I had pondered what I might do, should the Great Ring come into my hands.” She knows it has the power to ensure that the beauty she longs for will never fade away. But she has lived, and has seen the effects of nature and time outside of her lands, long enough to know that doing so would not be the land’s flourishing, but its conquering.

“I will diminish,” she says, rejecting the Ring, “and go into the West, and remain Galadriel” (II.7). By accepting the natural way of things, she endures great loss and gives up her greatest desires; but in doing so, she regains herself.

Grief over nature’s decline also becomes, under Tolkien’s pen, an agent of catharsis. Often his books’ strongest, most piercing moments of hope occur in the most bitter and sorrowful moments, such as the night when Samwise, surrounded by the ruin and desolation of Mordor, sees a single star shine through poisoned skies. Smitten by its beauty, he realizes “that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach” (VI.2).

This goes into the bones of Tolkien’s philosophy, where sorrow and hope are so closely linked that his pantheon of Ainur, beings that play the dual roles of gods and angels, contains Nienna, who “mourns for every wound that [the Earth] has suffered. . . . She does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope” (“Valaquenta”). Though sorrow and entropy pervade all of Middle-earth, they are not the final word. Where medieval poets see ruin and meaninglessness, Tolkien sees a spring overflowing with meaning.

Finally, Tolkien’s depiction of nature begins to blur the boundary between it and human culture, primarily by showing that culture is not, in fact, unnatural. Jeffrey Cohen reminds us that seeds of this idea are already discernible in medieval poetry, such as when Sir Gawain fails to realize as he is lost in Wirral that “his subjectivity is entangled in hazel and hawthorn, his embodiment completed by a flock of shivering birds, his knightly identity inseparable from his good steed Gringolet”; but also that it is we as modern readers, not Gawain, who are able to see this. While the idea is there in the poem, it is present only as a seed, not fully realized.

Tolkien, though, makes the idea explicit. Treebeard and the Ents march to war because they recognize that nature and humans ultimately have the same interests. In their very persons, the Ents are themselves a blurring of the boundaries between nature (in their essential treeishness) and culture (in their speech, songs, memory, and society). And through them, readers can sympathize with the side of nature and feel nature’s side as their own.

Having thus undermined the medieval human/nature dualism, Tolkien concludes The Lord of the Rings with an image of culture restored in balance with nature. The Shire, in the absence of Frodo and his friends, has been exploited and ruined by the proto-industrialist wizard Saruman. The land has suffered land-grabbing mechanization, and commodification, and in a parallel way, the hobbits have been cowed into submission. Even after proper order is restored, the river is still fouled, trees cut down, crops lost. The hobbits must renew their connection to the land, a connection that once allowed their simple society to flourish not despite, but within nature, and vice versa. This is achieved when Samwise uses the soil of Lothlórien, given to him by Galadriel, to heal the places where nature has been most scarred. It is not so much the soil that allows nature to flourish, but the Elven reverence and awe for nature that it represents.

Samwise, and the hobbits in general, embody the balance that Wendell Berry points to when he writes that “we may rightfully require certain things of [nature] — the things necessary to keep us fully alive as the kind of creature we are; but we also belong to it, and it makes certain rightful claims upon us.” Though they can be insular, unimaginative, narrow-minded, and parochial, the hobbits satisfy these claims, and the flourishing of nature under Samwise’s cultivation is evidence of this.

[There was] an air of richness and growth . . . and the yield of ‘leaf’ was astonishing; and everywhere there was so much corn that at Harvest every barn was stuffed. The Northfarthing barley was so fine that the beer of 1420 malt was long remembered and became a byword.

(VI.9)

The hobbits’ society melds an intimacy with nature with a well-developed culture, again undermining the human/nature dualism. They live in comfortable, well-provendered holes dug in the hillsides, with their feet bare and their hands in the earth, able to vanish into the landscape at need. Can their culture (and by extension, human culture) rightfully be considered separate from nature when the nests of a bird, the dam of a beaver, the web of a spider, or the warren of a rabbit are just as much works of architecture — of deliberate construction — as gardens, hearths, and even cities?

Tolkien suggests otherwise, by depicting the interconnected relationships we have with nature in vivid detail, where medieval poetry (as with Gawain in Wirral) contains them only implicitly, perhaps unconsciously. His stories encourage the recovery of awe and humility, the catharsis felt by feeling nature’s suffering (and feeling that nature feels our suffering), and the consolation that comes with a sense that we are perhaps not so fully exiled as we had feared. This reconciliation is very different from what is found in medieval poetry. Yet its presence in Tolkien is not in spite of medieval views of nature, but because of them. Its flowering is in modern fantasy, but its roots stem from medieval traditions.

]]>1964Citrushttps://mluce.ro/stories/citrus/
Sat, 04 Nov 2017 00:04:54 +0000https://mluce.ro/?p=2061If the ferry didn’t come soon it wouldn’t come at all, and Simon would be stuck on Hogfish Key another night. Which wouldn’t be so bad if the Keys did not lie in the path of Adeline, a Category 4 and counting, expected to make landfall in the night.

He’d been foolish to stay so long. Most of the few residents had left already, and the island was all but empty, the dock deserted. The barnacled wood, rocking gently on supple waves, creaked in his ears, oddly clear. He could not feel or hear the wind. It, and most every other sound, lingered only as a ghost.

It might have been serene — in an eerie, ominous sort of way — were it not for the boy. Dark of skin, eight or nine years old. Simon didn’t know about kids, so he wasn’t sure and didn’t care anyway. He did care that the child sat so close to him on the bench, so very close, when all other benches were empty. It galled him to no end. The boy wore a blue button-up shirt and coral shorts, and a backpack which was filled, evidently, with snacks. At the moment, he held a juicy pineapple ring, the rind cut off neatly. Its ichor dripped down both hands and arms as he took a noisy bite.

The boy breathed a soft, satisfied sigh. He leaned back and stretched his arms, and Simon hoped he wouldn’t touch him with those wet, sticky hands. He flinched away — too late. He felt the small hand graze his stubbled cheek.

The boy stared in wordless surprise. As if he hadn’t realized Simon was there at all till his hand had felt the truth of it. The two gazed at each other a moment, Simon stifling rage, the child not stifling curiosity.

The boy smiled and took another pineapple ring from his bag. When he finished he threw a small piece, a bit with the rind left overlooked, at the trash can at the far side of the little pier. Missed, of course. Normally a gull would swoop down and take it, but Simon hadn’t seen a gull the entire afternoon.

It was his turn to sigh now. He regretted staying so long, but more, regretted coming to this little sliver of land in the first place. The trip had brought him no answers, only questions. The ground felt less solid beneath him than when he arrived five days ago.

Simon spoke the name under his breath, as if doing so would make the story write itself. Pascual Servando de Paz, serial abductor and torturer. A media sensation last summer, and now again this past week, after the sentencing. More was known now than when the victims were first found, but none of it made the man easier to understand. Things only made less and less sense.

* * *

It started with Eugene Drury of Key West, a homeless man, age 43. Then a thirty-something tourist had vanished in Islamorada, then a frail grandmother of Miami, and finally two little girls outside Port St. Lucie. It was the last two that had caught police and FBI attention; before that, local authorities had seen nothing more than a missing person case or two.

Annabeth and Lilli changed all of that.

De Paz’s reign of terror lasted twelve days, during which Floridians feared to let their children out of sight, or their elderly. One by one the victims showed up, abandoned but traumatized by de Paz, bread crumbs that led to his arrest in Alabama fifteen miles past state lines. They found him in his dusty Jeep, staring straight ahead, waiting. The Jeep was empty; he had let the girls go at a Shell station nearby.

A happy ending, the bad guy caught.

That was then, of course — before anyone knew a thing about the man. Simon himself had reported the story, as had dozens of other journalists, so he knew the details well. An operator and tour guide at the island’s distillery, de Paz was passionate in his work and had the knowledge and insight to excel at it. He’d even consulted for a book on rum history back in ’06. As to his personal life, he lived with one Maricela Pilar, a girlfriend of five years to whom he’d recently been engaged, and her daughter, who de Paz loved and got along with, if anything, better than Pilar did herself.

He was not that fictional creature folk call a happy man; he was something far rarer, healthier, more at home in the world: a contented man. A rewarding career, a beautiful home, the love of his life, soon to be his wife, a child he loved as his own. Any one of these things are precious and rare, Simon thought. Let alone to have all of them. Pascual Servando de Paz, it seemed, had everything he could have wish for.

It didn’t make sense. Why would such a man just snap?

He was clearly not a psychopath; he’d expressed remorse for his crimes, empathy for those he’d terrorized and hurt. He’d asked for no ransom, made no demand, had nothing to gain from his spree. So…why had he done it?

Theories abounded, of course, but none held water, as most theorists themselves would admit if you pressed them on it. Most were willing to shrug it off and move on to a more current story.

Not Simon Hargrove. Not now, anyway, the trial just finished and the story troubling him yet again. It was on a hunch that he’d come here — to Hogfish Key, near the end of September and in the middle of hurricane season — to speak with de Paz’s fiancée.

* * *

He arrived by ferry, Monday morning, without a scrap of information as to her address, knowing only that she made pastries for a local street vendor who catered to tourists, as most business this side of Hogfish did. It was a small bit of land, even for one of the Keys, with no road bridge to Key West and barely more than a single sand-strewn road running the spine of the island, cleaving the tourism side from the distillery.

It had been a warm and muggy day, quite unlike today, and Simon had ordered a mojito from the first bar he found, little more than a shack on the sleepy beach. He squeezed a lime wedge into the glass and pushed it below the ice with his straw, eying the bartender: a deeply tanned, long-haired man whose age was hard to tell.

Simon calculated a moment. It was a small island, yes. Small enough that its residents might know each other. Such communities were often insular, and he doubted the man would give her away if he asked. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to try.

“Do you know a Maricela Pilar? A chef of some sort?”

He hoped his vagueness, and the lack of mentioning de Paz, would arouse less suspicion but he needn’t have worried. The man gave a vague smile and pointed west. “Who, Mari? Oh, yeah, her food is the best. Haven’t seen her in ages, not since…” He frowned a moment. “Keeps to herself anymore. Only Mason sees her much, and just when she drops her stuff off.”

“And this Mason is…?”

“His truck’s at the far side of the beach, over by the mangroves. But Mari probably won’t be there.”

Simon wasn’t surprised. She had kept herself distant from media of all types, especially reporters like him. Her phone service had been cancelled last year, and she had little to no internet presence, having deleted the few social media accounts she’d had. It would be a feat to track her down, despite how hard it was to hide in such a small place.

A five-minute walk later he spotted the food truck — a trailer, really, an Airstream painted Bahamian blue with fish swarming round a hand-lettered menu. Three women were in line already, two in bikinis and the other in a faded sundress. He studied them, wondered if one might be Maricela Pilar. They looked to be about her age. He peered inside. This Mason, who bought pastries from her, wasn’t even working today; only a teenager, her dreads languid and heavy in the thick air.

He came to the front of the line. Should he ask about Pilar? He felt sheepish, having stared at those women; he had no wish to be thought a stalker. “I, uh…just, can I have a slice of key lime pie?”

“Sorry,” the girl’s eyebrows shot up. “Just sold the last piece of the day.”

“Ah. Well, never mind then. Oh! But I’m looking for Maricela Pilar, who I understand supplies them for you. For Mason. If you see her, can you give her my card?”

She read the slip of paper he handed her, looked back and forth between it and him, eyes narrowed. She didn’t answer so he gave a half smile, turned, and walked quickly away.

He didn’t find her that day, or the next. She found him — at the bar, halfway into a margarita, studying the salt-rimmed glass in impatient annoyance as the same bartender watched a soccer game on a portable television at least fifteen years old.

“You’re the reporter,” she said, not asked, having slipped into the stool beside him. He looked her over, startled. She didn’t make eye contact, but he knew exactly who she was, though he’d never seen a photo before. She was younger than he’d expected.

Simon drew in a breath, ransacked his mind for the words he’d carefully prepared. Before he could speak, she said, “I’ll tell you what you want to know.” When he didn’t answer, stunned, she went on. “You’re here about Pascual, right?” She smiled ironically. “Why else would you be here?”

“Okay,” Simon managed lamely.

She ordered a margarita for herself — “On him.” — and turned to face him at last. “I thought all of you had given up hounding me by now. What is it you want to know?”

“Well, I wanted to … Wait!” he sputtered. “Can I ask…? Why are you talking to me so readily? When you’ve kept the media away all this time? Why now?”

She smirked again. “Maybe because you remind me a lot of him.”

His skin blanched, then flushed. “Really?”

“No. Not at all. I have one condition. For all of this.”

“Anything.”

“You’re not going to like it,” she warned.

“Let me decide that.”

Pilar gave a slow nod. “Okay. You can’t print any of this. It’s off the record. Anything I tell you.”

Simon found himself nodding. It wasn’t what he wanted, but somehow that didn’t matter. He’d come here for his own strange fascination in the case as much as for his job. Before speaking, though, he reached quickly into his pocket and set his phone to record.

* * *

“Why him?” Simon began. “Do you have any idea?”

Maricela Pilar smiled ruefully. “Don’t people always say that when it happens? ‘He was the last guy anyone would think…’ ”

“People do, but there is a type. Isolated, socially awkward, loners. But I have the impression, and please, correct me if I’m wrong, that de Paz was none of those things.”

Pilar blinked and her eyes grew a shade greyer. “No,” she said, almost to herself. “No, he wasn’t.”

She took a deep drink and sighed. “I’ll tell you what I think, what I know. I don’t know his mind, but I know him. I know things no one else does. You’re right. He was happy, extroverted. He didn’t care about things like success or money or power. He took what life gave him. Laughed at himself — all the time. He couldn’t stay angry at anyone, which I can tell you, that made me angry sometimes. You couldn’t get him to dislike anyone, and believe me, I tried.”

Simon shook his head. “So…what happened?”

Pilar gazed at the bar, studied the whorls of unvarnished wood. He thought he saw, for the first time, a look of defeat, of regret. She wouldn’t look at him, but her shell of cool confidence had cracked.

“He was drunk that night. Six, seven months, maybe, before the arrest. There was a fight. A bar fight. Not here — he took the ferry east that day on business, then stopped for a drink in the evening. A little dive on Higg’s Beach. Some rum drink, I’m sure.” She smiled wistfully. “That man loved rum the way some men love their country. He wasn’t a mean drunk, either. It just brought him out more and more, so that everyone was his friend.”

“So, a fight,” Simon broke in. “What was it about?”

“I don’t remember,” said Pilar. Simon watched her closely. Her eyes were still downcast but her voice grew softer, like she was talking more to herself than to him now. “He told me, but I guess it didn’t seem important then. What was strange was that it happened at all. Not in the bar — out by the dog park, across the street. Some tough guy wandered by, probably a stray from the tourist traps. Anyway, Pascual beat him to a pulp.”

Pilar met Simon’s eyes again, her own bright and wide as if she’d just remembered he was there. “It scared me. Him come home like that? All that blood, the bruises? I didn’t know what happened till he sobered up in the morning.”

Simon frowned. This felt more in line with the man the media had come to know, but it still didn’t draw a straight line from his life with Pilar to the abductions. “And then?”

Pilar shrugged. She shook her head, then didn’t stop shaking it. She stared at the dregs of her drink. The bartender, pretending not to listen up till now, stood still, the lime halves he’d been cutting into wedges forgotten on the counter.

“And then…then the fear came. Not me. I got over the whole thing fast; though I can tell you it was a shock, him of all people. Fights happen, you know? You move on.

“He didn’t, though. He couldn’t. He couldn’t forget what he’d done. What he’d never believed he was capable of. It was a poisoned root in his belly, and it grew to where he couldn’t trust himself. Couldn’t forgive himself. The fear he had…it was of him. He could barely eat, had trouble breathing. His heart would pound and his stomach burn.

“He said to me one night, ‘If I could do that to another man then what else is there inside me? Any moment I could ruin everything, just reach out and crush the life we’ve built together with my hands. Part of me wants to — just to get it over with. So I don’t have to feel like there’s a bomb inside of me, waiting to go off.’ I remember he told me that in bed, shirtless, the sweat of his guilt pooling on his brow and his chest. I comforted him; or I tried. I said that wasn’t him, never had been, he was not the kind to be violent like that. It didn’t help.”

She sighed. “That fear…it had a gravity of his own, and it sucked him in with the force of his own imagination. Then…well, guess he kind of figured he couldn’t take it another day. He did what he’d said — grabbed it in both hands and crushed it.”

Pilar slammed her hand on the bar. Her fingers seized a forgotten lime half and she held it like the heart of a human sacrifice, and squeezed. They were strong fingers, Simon saw; the lime emptied onto the bar, pulp, juice, and seed, till all she held was the empty rind.

She sat on her stool again and slumped forward, defeated. The bartender stared and said nothing.

“That’s why he took them,” she intoned. “That’s why Pascual did what he did. I’m sure of it. He finally did the terrible thing.”

Pilar downed the rest of her glass; melted ice by now, Simon guessed, but it looked like she needed it either way. He did, too, but it was not the time to order another. That much was clear.

She looked up at him, weary and bereft, then looked away. Then did the same motions over again. Simon exhaled, released a rattling breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Thank you,” he said, having no other words. She didn’t reply, and he left her alone.

Two days passed before he decided to leave. He hadn’t planned to stay this long, especially with the news that Adelaide had veered off its course, and headed straight toward the Keys now. But the island held him in place, earthfast.

He couldn’t fathom it. There was no way he would ever do a thing like de Paz had, whatever piss-drunk brawl he might find himself in. Simon wasn’t sure what baffled him most: the fact that Pilar’s story was beyond his understanding, or that it was, apparently, a possible thing for a person to do. It left a sour taste in his mouth.

On Thursday, that very morning, the malaise wore off. He rose from his hotel bed and knew it was time to leave.

Simon glanced at his phone; he’d overslept and missed the check-out time. He dashed toward the lobby office to ask for an exception on the fee, considering the hurricane, but the lobby was locked, empty. The whole island seemed abandoned — probably days ago, as he had moped alone in his room.

The first two of the three ferries had come and gone by now; the last would return in an hour. Simon walked the short distance to the dock, very aware that the ground he trod might well contain Pascual de Paz’s own footsteps, impressions left by the man in this place he had so violently fled. Now Simon, too, walked in those footsteps, and shivered.

There was no sense to be made of it, he decided now, inching away from the sticky-handed boy. He might as well write the whole trip off. Even if he could figure it out, even if he wanted to print it, he couldn’t use what he had found. At best, Simon had to call it a wash.

Well, so what if it was? It wouldn’t be the first time a lead had not panned out. Nor the second, nor the hundredth and second. It came with the territory; he knew that well.

If only he could shake the lingering dismay, the disappointment.

He asked himself: Disappointment? In what?

He answered: In Maricela Pilar and her story. In de Paz. In this island. And…in myself.

Myself? For what?

For not understanding. Not comprehending.

Beside him, nearly forgotten by Simon, the boy finished his last ring of pineapple. He licked his hands, then reached into his backpack, drawing out — half a lime. He opened the plastic sandwich bag (his mother must have packed it for him) and studied it for a long moment.

Who was this child? Simon hadn’t even spoken to him yet, he realized only now. Even though they sat together in the shadow of a storm, bracing together in the unquiet calm of a drawn breath. They were here together, each rapt in thought: Simon, of the depths of human misery. The boy, of a simple hemisphere of fruit.

The boy cupped the lime in both hands as if it were a communion bowl and brought it to his lips, where he sucked and slurped on its juices. Simon stared. It was strange to see someone eat a lime in this way, by itself. But then, he thought, there are different ways to eat bitter food. Some can’t stand it at all, while others eat grapefruit for breakfast with its own special spoon.

It might be sweet, Simon felt as the boy enjoyed the lime, to taste one for himself. To hold the thing in his hands like the boy did, softly and with grace, even knowing that it might be bitter. To live in that tension, hands streaming with bright citrus, and thrive in it.

He looked at his watch and noted the time. No, the ferry wouldn’t come, not today — for either of them. They were here together, and Adeline held them both in its hand, just as Pascual had held his perfect life.

The clouds were darkening, their weight gathering in the east. Simon stood and turned to his companion. “Hey, buddy. What’s your name?”

“Miles,” the boy said. He met Simon’s eyes again and the reporter noted a likeness he hadn’t seen till now, the certain way his eyes crinkled with curiosity. Like the stare of the girl at Mason’s food truck, but less closed-off, less wary. Simon smiled.

I spit — salt on my lips, thick on my tongue, and sand, and something worse, half rotten. Water in my throat.

My body twists, and I heave. I lie on my stomach and watch with light-blind eyes as bile merges into pitted white rock. I reach for support, but my fingers grasp only tangles of some fleshy, waterlogged plant.

Thirst. The only feeling my body registers. And water. The only word my mind can form. I am dying. I cannot rise, only lie, half in oblivion. Now and then a gull’s cry breaks the surface of my awareness, a shrill yet shallow sound. But there is always a softness. Faint, but constant, the only thing that tethers me to life. A voice, a soft sigh, a whisper that beckons, teases, suggests, soothes.

I sleep. And wake again. Time is paralyzed, the sun an endless hammer on my skin. Sleep offers no shelter, no relief. Only one part of me is free of agony, the place where my head has come to rest, somehow, on soaked leather, the binding of a book that has washed ashore before me.

TWO. The Years Have Taken Atoll

When I finally rise — a day after waking, maybe, I do not know — I walk the empty shoreline, filled with despair. My feet are unsteady, my legs weak with thirst. I think I will die soon, here in this place that isn’t a place.

Sand and rock. A long, narrow arc of it as far as I can see. The island is an atoll, a narrow ring of beach around a wide lagoon, nothing more. Enough room to stretch out, to let the waves on either side caress my feet and hands. That is all. A ribbon of land, alone in a world of blue. A blazing, impossible blue that shames the sky.

I cannot walk the full ring of it. It is wide, so that I cannot see the farther side, but that is not why.

I can see it from far off. A dark mass inside the lagoon. The ocean is shallow here, barely deeper than sea level both inside the atoll and out, and I wonder if it is a cloud’s shadow. No, it is too dark for that. My step hastens, curious now.

No, I am wrong. It is not a mass that lies in the water. It is nothing. A dark pit of nothing. It sinks into the lagoon, deeper than the sea, bottomless maybe. A great blue hole. Empty. Alien.

I turn to leave. I do not run; I could not. My body shakes with hunger. And something else now, something new. No, I will not go back that way. There is nothing good near that hole, nor beyond it.

THREE. Bitter Fruit

It is evening, and I look for food, as I do every day at this time. The setting sun is not so hot now, not so cruel. But there is little time to search before the ocean will swallow it again and spill night like ink over everything. I have been here three days now. There is nowhere to sleep at night but sand. Nowhere at all to hide.

I am starving. I know this. Another day or so without food, and I will die. I do not know how I am still alive at all. No fresh water here, not in a place like this.

But I dream. They are faint, half-remembered dreams. A woman comes to me, a woman with a strange face, and makes me drink.

It is evening, and I walk the beach, and flies sting my burnt skin. Strange pink bodies with purple eyes and zebra-striped wings. Yellow fish swim in the shallows. I try to think of ways to catch them. There are tracks in the sand, too large to be gulls, but I see no bird in the sky, no nest I could raid. Tonight, like most nights so far, I will fall asleep hungry.

In the morning a large plant like a bean-pod washes ashore, tattered and broken. Inside I find round, heart-shaped discs that fit in my palm, a deep chestnut brown. I bite into one. My mouth fills with a soapy taste. I spit, then laugh, and then bite into another. Later in the day, I find oysters not far off the island. But I have no knife to open them. I realize this, and the joy I felt at the sight of them turns to grief so sharp it could cut.

But there are conch. I break one open, pulling out the slick grey meat, still alive. I strike it with a jagged rock. It is sweet, though chewy. No hint of fishiness.

I lie on the beach as the sun sets again, my belly aching, no longer empty. The weight of food feels foreign, exotic. My last thought as sleep takes me is that there was no guilt, no horror at all, in the killing.

FOUR. Pages

There is no reason to, but I carry the book as I walk the strip of beach. It is dry now, but the pages are warped by seawater, the ink blurred and smeared. Not that that matters. It is written in a language I cannot speak, in letters I cannot read.

I think often of throwing it back in the ocean. I never do.

Is it mine? I do not know. I can’t remember — that, or anything else, for that matter. My name. How I came to be at sea. Why I nearly drowned. Whoever I was, whatever my life has been, it is gone now. Where history should be etched in my skin, the soles of my feet, the tip of my tongue, it is all empty. Blank. Nothing.

The ocean is the entire world now. I stare at it and let it work its glamor on me. I see it in my dreams, too, and sleeping or waking I am lost in its many forms. Waxing, ebbing, drenching, foaming, swelling, splashing. Life-cradling. Thirst enthralling.

As expected, I can still find no fresh water.

My third night here — or fourth; it is hard to know for sure — I think of the dream from that first night when I washed ashore. Tonight when I lie on the sand I only pretend to sleep. The pages of my pillow compress beneath my head, accordion-like. I breathe deep. The night is not so dark, for my eyes can see by starlight now.

When she comes, I am not surprised. I wait while she holds water to my lips and tilts my head, then I pretend to wake. She, too, seems to have expected it. Stars dance in her dark eyes. I wonder if I have dreamed her after all.

FIVE. Ornimegalonyx

In the morning, while she eats, I watch her. She bites deep into a mango, the twin of which I have already eaten. It fits so neatly in her hand. Juicy, rich, unbearably sweet. Where did she get them? I do not ask. I am wary of moving things along too quick.

Her face is dark, and lined. Not wrinkled — the skin is smooth, and sags nowhere. The lines run straight down from her forehead to her chin, parallel. I wonder what it means.

Her colors — yellow mango, brown skin, white teeth — make the blue behind her less blinding. I see beauty in this place now. For the first time. The flora (scrub on igneous stone, no more) pulses with fresh, thriving green, and even the sea steals my breath. How its clear shallows sink into brilliant then profoundest blue.

I follow her. The day flexes and I feel its strength on my brow, in my shoulders. We pass relict dunes where grasses still grow, then a weathered tree that shades the sand. I laugh. Not at her, or even at the tree, but at the shadows.

By the time we stop the island has grown no wider, still a sliver of sand above water, bound by the same shallows. But there are more trees here, more shade. We sit under drooping, palmlike leaves and we are silent before the evening. She gives me fresh water in a bowl made of some hollowed fruit. I look out over the lagoon, wondering if the tiny bit of sand I see beyond it is the place where I washed ashore. I cannot tell.

It is almost dark when I see them. They look like owls. Two of them, brown with white breast. But they stand nearly as tall as I would on legs as long as their bodies.

Am I dreaming? If so then she is, too, for she is watching them. The owls wander, searching for food with their small yellow eyes that bore into the ground. When they finally see me they do not fly away, but run in long, loping strides, hunched over, their backs nearly level with the ground.

When they are gone, I sigh. And she speaks for the first time.

SIX. Names

“What is this place?” I ask, our third day this side of the atoll. It is evening and we are waiting for the owls, who always come at dusk and wade into the shallows to watch for fish. By now, survival no longer gnaws my nerves so deeply, and my mind finds space to think. The space itself is unnerving, in its own way.

She doesn’t answer. But I can tell she is thinking, intent as she is on the fruit she is peeling with a sharpened oyster shell. She scrapes the rind away and hands me a piece. I take it, consider the immensity in my question, and try again.

“Where is this place?”

“Where?” her voice lilts, as if answering a child. Her hand arcs to trace the island’s edge. “It is here — just as you see it.”

I taste the fruit. It is sweet to my lips, and tart. My eyes widen in surprised. She hands me another. “What are the owls?” I ask.

“They have always been here,” she says. “Before the island wore away, before the reef rose to shelter it, before the first plant took root on its shores, they were here.”

“Is that what this is? A reef?”

“The bones of it. There was a port here once, sheltered inside the lagoon. Men sailed from it and sold slaves in their villages, and beached their ships to scour barnacles from the hulls. And now,” she pauses, breaking off a piece of fruit to taste for herself. She smiles and does not speak, and I wish I had not eaten mine so quickly. She drinks rainwater from her bowl and wipes her lips, looking me straight in the eye. “Now we are all that’s left. People of sand and waves.”

I wonder how long ago all of that was. How long does it take for an entire island to disappear, leaving only a ring of sand-scattered reef to show where it once had been?

“Where are the others?” I ask.

“Others?”

“You said people of sand and waves. Where are the people? You’re the only soul I’ve seen, and I…” my voice breaks. “I don’t even know what to call you.”

She swallows her bite and tilts her chin. “Why do you ask me this?” She looks away, troubled. “If you do not know, then maybe it is not for me to tell.”

My heart drums and the surf lashes at my toes. I don’t know what to say. I do not understand.

SEVEN. The Mouth

While hunting for conch one day I spot a gleam in the shallows. Eyeglasses? I doubt my eyes at first, but when I lift them out of the water there is no mistake. They look old, the frames corroded and twisted, barely thicker than wire.

I do not know why, but they trouble me. They look ancient, buried, lost to time, and now — back again. My stomach churns. My shoulders shake. Something stirs in my mind. A memory?

“I have seen such things,” the woman says when I bring them to her.

“Where?”

“Here and there, every once in a while. When I find them I burn them, or bury them beneath the mango roots.”

Weeks, maybe months, have passed since that first mango. In all this time I have not asked her about it, afraid she would grow jealous and withhold her gifts. But I am nearly sick of their sweetness by now, so I ask her.

“It’s not far. I can take you there, but there is something you need to know. Like all the fruit trees in this place, it is near the Mouth.” She sees his confusion. “The great blue hole,” she explains. “The one you looked into and feared.”

Hair rises on my arm, and I shiver. Something deep inside me clenches. “These things you find,” I ask. “Did any of them wash up with me? On the same day?”

She gives me an odd look, and will not answer.

When I wake the next morning, she is gone. She always is in the mornings, to walk the island and gather food. But today she does not return, not till an hour before night. She lays down a ragged net and from it spreads out fish and fruit and seagull eggs. I build us a fire, and she watches.

“I made a boat,” she breaks the silence at length. “I’ve been making it since you arrived. Out of driftwood.” I look up at her, startled by the news. Firelight writhes in her eyes. “If you want it, it is yours.”

EIGHT. What if the world has cast me out and this place is all I have left?

We stare out at the lagoon together, our backs to the sea. I struggle to think, to explain my reluctance. To sort out the frayed strands of my fear, why the pit in my stomach has opened again. She waits and does not press me.

I am grateful for that. It’s not enough time, a single night’s sleep to decide, no more.

The day is bright and the breeze is cool, the white sand soft to our fingers and toes, soft and salt-sprayed. The world looks newly created today. Perhaps it is. Every texture of rock I can see is still forming, carved by the wind’s restless hands. Every curve of the island’s ring still taking shape. The birds that hide in the wrack still labor, their nests a work in progress.

I do not belong here. I know that. Out there, beyond the lagoon, across the sea — that is where I belong.

“What if I never remember?” I speak at last. “Where I’m from. Where I’ve been. What I’ve done.”

“Returning could help,” she says. She grinds one of the heart-shaped beans in her teeth, hands jittery and folded on her knees. “Seeing the things that you have known.”

“What if there’s no one for me to go back to?”

“There is an island in this sea,” she says, eyes far away, “and on it, where the forest is deepest, there is a great black stone hung with vines and ferns. Sometimes a flower grows there, and if you hold it and speak the name of the one you love, they will come to you, no matter how far away. I was told this,” she fixes me with her gaze now. “But I do not believe it.”

I do not know what to say. Who was it that told her, I wonder? And why does she tell me? Could her story somehow be an answer to my question?

As I think, my fingers trace grooves in the sand: owl tracks, their talon-marks as big as my hand. The tracks taunt me, proof of the owl’s presence and of their absence. I imagine them walking Bahamian shores, Caribbean forests, in days before they’d vanished from all places save here.

Caribbean. Bahamian. The words blaze in my mind as they surface, and with them faces come, too, half-distinct and nameless. And distant, somehow. Dead, maybe, or disloyal. My breath quickens and shallows, and she takes notice.

“What if the world has cast me out,” I plead, “and this place is all I have left?”

To this she gives no answer.

NINE. Colors Like a Hummingbird’s Throat

After nine days I wake with a clearer mind, if not a steadier heart. I leave the place where our forms have left shapes in the sand, wand walk the way she always does in the mornings, sea on my left, lagoon on my right — toward the mangoes. Before an hour passes I find the place, thicker than I would have thought. But the trees are not as tall, and it is cooler here. I feel safe, sheltered. Relieved.

Among the roots, just where she said, I find the things she has gathered from the shallows. A pocketwatch, heavy and ornate. A rusted knife she has cleaned and smoothed, the layers of rust and salt and coral cleared away. Broken chain-links. And then, on the other side of the tree, weighted by three mangoes, I see the book.

I haven’t noticed its absence — not since I met her. It feels strange in my hand now. Its weight is the same, but it seems to pulse with something new, some possibility the sea had once washed away.

I almost open it, wondering if the words will speak to me now, but I wait. There will be time enough for that in days to come. But I must go on. It is more than clear to me now.

I take the three mangoes with me, and drink from the hollowed log where she keeps rainwater. Just beyond the trees I see the boat. I am surprised how well-made it is, and alarmed at how small. I place the book and the mangoes inside it and press on.

Too soon, I see the Mouth. My heart quakes and my arms feel weak, unsteady, filled with the same searing exhaustion as before, a lifetime ago it feels, when I met it from the other side. I have come full circle — to a dark and empty circle.

I step into the water and force myself to wade in. At least here in the lagoon I am safe from waves, from currents. The water is crystal for a while, deepening gradually. I am not even up to my knees yet.

And now, now I am here. I tremble at its edge, looking into its depth. If I drown I will sink into the pits of the earth, the entire water column crushing me. I taste the air, swallow the lead on my tongue, and plunge in.

I am terrified. My eyes close against the sun. Somehow I turn and float on my back, suspended over the very thing I fear most.

Whatever formed the Mouth, it is a part of this place. More a part of its story than I am, or even she is. A story that the Mouth, were it to speak, could not tell for all its long years, eons, all its settings and moods and textures, endless facets like the colors of a hummingbird’s throat.

I force myself to be here, here where I already am. Above the black, above the emptiness. And I let go. Time opens up and stretches forever, or exists in a single instant. I cannot tell. Then somehow the twinging in my chest begins to calm, and a long time after that, it ceases.

]]>2052Tideshttps://mluce.ro/stories/tides/
https://mluce.ro/stories/tides/#respondThu, 17 Nov 2016 09:10:26 +0000http://mluce.ro/?p=425She has only been on the island for twenty minutes, and already she’s disappointed. The lock clicks behind her, all dull sound that echoes her mood. She saw again, set over reality in a thin haze of memory, the image on the hotel website. Cool, serene hues, aqua and teal and fresh lime. Headboards of bamboo, walls vibrant with abstract art. Twin glasses, mimosa-filled, are set before the mirror that shows the bed and the balcony overlooking the blue shore. She can almost hear the waves whisper, can feel the soft breeze flitting in her hair, can taste the sea tang on her lips.

Or she could, at least, sitting at her laptop at home a week ago, pricing her stay here for the long weekend. She’d found the hotel, the only one on the island, on one of those travel discount sites. The price had seemed too good to be true, based on those photos.

It was. The vision fades, leaving only olive-green carpet, pale sky-blue walls, the awful orange of the bed pillows. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a beachfront hotel room — someone who’s been asleep since the ‘70s, only walking mere days ago. No balcony, of course. No mimosas. Only two empty tumblers, upside-down, on the particle-board corner desk.

Haven leaves her luggage in the narrow closet, then sits on the bed, winces as the frayed rattan headboard creaks behind her. She opens the laptop she’d stowed in her shoulder-bag and double-checks the address of the office where her interview (one she still can’t believe she has scored) will be held.

Her phone buzzes in her purse. She sighs, seeing the caller’s name, and slides it unlocked. “Hello, Dad.”

“Are you nervous?” She hesitates. “You know,” he barrels on, “you can always come back home. Move in with us. Find an internship next year. No need to rush into things. Your mother could still use you. For, uh, the company,” he finishes, a bit lamely.

Haven knows exactly what he means, though. How many months has Mom been ill now, the doctors unable to find out the cause? How long since she’d lost all the weight? She has always been obsessed with health and her shape, but even though she looks more like a stick figure than a cover model, she resists eating more than a few mouthfuls, afraid to make things worse. It feels as if she’s lost interest in getting better. Since that time, every visit feels as if their roles have been reversed. It’s like taking care of a child, making sure her mother eats and gets enough exercise to stay strong and avoid atrophy. Nor had her father been any use when she had needed him.

“No, I’m not nervous,” she lies. Not that nervous, at least. Though she knows it won’t be the last time he will call and ask her to come home. She says goodbye, tosses the phone onto her bed.

Haven lets her thoughts slip away, lies down and tries to find peace. It’s hard not to think about her parents, though. Obligations, pressures, guilt trips…

“Damn it,” she swears under her breath. “I’m not doing this. Not today. Not this weekend.”

She leaves her room and walks onto the beach. The air is humid, heavy, but cool. The sky flat and pearly. Waves roar in her ears, dull as the sound of the lock in her hotel room, but alive as well, stirring something in her.

Wind whips in her hair, blows it in her face in tangles, and she laughs. Gulls yearn from far away, voices eerie as sirens. She kicks off her sandals. Sand slips between her toes.

Time sinks away. The tide rides and Haven watches, sitting with her chin rested on her knee. It isn’t quite tourist season, but she’s never seen the beach this empty. Surfers wade in near the pier; a block or two away, a dog catches a frisbee. Too far away to hear. The stillness is nice. Pelicans dive and vanish, rise again with gravid throats, riding rafts of foam over waves a metallic green. Green or purple; it’s hard to tell in the pale, shifting light.

She almost feels the footsteps when they come: more a tremble than a tremor, not strong enough to make sand shiver. She turns to look. A stone’s throw or two away, back by the dunes, a figure walks with downcast eyes. His right arm bears something like a cane or a golf club, wrapped in a wire. He sweeps it side to side — a metal detector, of course.

Haven watches him. She’s certain he hasn’t noticed her, lost as he is in his effort. There’s something intriguing about that. The way he walks, as if doing what he’s meant to do, no doubt or distraction or worry.

Her eyes close, and calm rushes over her. Too much of it. If she stays for much longer, she’ll sleep here on the shore, and the tide will wake her. As nice as that seems in theory, the ocean looks cold today. Haven rises and trudges to the hotel, sand sticking to her limbs and lips and somehow, caught in her hair. The lobby is bright and inviting, just as the interwebs had promised. Her own room is still tired and weary.

She falls on the bed, aware that something is wrong, something is missing, but too drowsy just now to care.

* * *

I could sleep, I could sleep. When I lived alone—

Haven’s hand pounds her phone on the bedside table, silencing the Band of Horses song she has set for her alarm. She stares stupidly at the screen, wondering what she’s doing. It’s 8:16. In the morning.

“Shit! Shit!” She leaps from the bed and tears off her old jeans, nearly tripping on the way to the bathroom. Her face looks tired and unkempt in the mirror, but panic is filling her bloodstream, lending her energy.

She splashes cold water in her face. It’s clear enough what has happened. What she’d meant to be a nap, assuming she’d wake in the early evening, had spanned the night and invaded early morning. The alarm was set for eight, but she must have snoozed it. She hadn’t meant to do that. Hadn’t known she was so drained. There is no time to do her hair now, or double-check her resume, her portfolio — things she should have done before leaving home, after all.

She throws on the white top, black pants, and light grey blazer she’d selected after checking the staff page on their website for a taste of how they dressed at the magazine, and is out the door, fumbling with her keys (“Damn it! Damn it! Okay, here we go.”) a moment before climbing into her car and darting out of the hotel lot, up the central road through town and toward the mainland, muted braids of green and blue slipping past her windows as she crosses the bridge. Calm fills her, somber and stern.

Things have to go this way, don’t they? On today, of all days. It isn’t a random internship she’s interviewing for, after all. This is it. Haven has read Kindred for over three years now, the small-press bimonthly on culture, art, and social justice she’d discovered first as a podcast, then an iPad app, and finally the print copy, its cover a dull satin gloss, its pages crisp and sharp. It’s the first hard copy of…well, nearly anything that she’s read since college. A tactile pleasure in her hands.

Writing for them was her dream all through junior and senior year. They’re passionate about what they do, have a keen sense of design, and though they don’t pay much, they have a solid subscribership belying their size, and several of their writers and editors, she’s noticed, have moved on to success with other publishers. If she can get this job, her dreams are in reach. It will take a while, but Haven is willing to wait.

Her phone interrupts her blurred thought to tell her she’s arrived. She’s made it here more or less on time, though she wonders, laughing as she lurches into the first parking spot she can find on the roadside, if the senior editor will share her liberal definition of “on time.”

Through glass storefront windows she can see, past all-caps Gotham letters that spell KINDRED, a cozy and casual meeting room, and past that, an understated grid of desks and shelves. A man with blond hair and a reddish beard spots her coming and meets her at the door.

“Haven Roe?”

“Yes,” she breathes, standing straight and forcing a smile.

“Sorry about the traffic. We planned on you being late since you’re from out of town. It can be,” he pauses, smirks, “a little overwhelming if you don’t know what to expect.”

“Yes,” she nods. “The traffic. It definitely was. Very bad.”

His smile widens. “Well, I’m Aaron. You can take a seat on the sofa, and I’ll let Keller know you’re here.”

She sits in front of the wide table, grateful he hasn’t noticed her disheveled looks, and glances around the room. At the dry-erase board with notes for future stories, the blown up covers from past issues, At the white glow of an Apple logo from a desk nearby. Haven hasn’t imagined the place would look like this: so normal, so laid-back, filled with people who, aside from the CEO who she knows has run the magazine for the past twenty years, were more or less her own age. The place feels too real. In a way it hasn’t before.

Minutes pass. Her foot starts to tap, slow at first but then quicker, till her left leg is shaking. Her veins, too, begin to throb, matching its rhythm. Her breath comes heavy, ragged. What is she doing here?

“It’s okay,” she stammers, and flashes her phone. “I just got a text. Emergency call. I have to go. Sorry I’ve wasted your time.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer. Not when the door is so close, her feet so quick on the tile floor. Her own steps are all she hears till the blare of a car horn jars her from her panic. What did she just do?

It’s done, whatever it is, whatever reason she did it. She climbs in the car and drives away, not looking back.

* * *

Her thoughts start working again somewhere near the bridge back to the island. What happened, girl? Why did you choke? It isn’t as if she hasn’t prepared for this, gone over every possible question in her mind, chosen the best answers for each. She remembers how present she felt in that meeting room, jarred by reality as if it by icy rain dripping down the back of her neck. She wants to slam her head onto the steering wheel, but she’s too dazed to do even this.

Tiny raindrops spangle her windshield, but the sun is brightening. Light invades the island again as she pulls into the hotel lot, and by the time she slips into the lobby she is grateful for the shade. She reaches for sunglasses in her shoulder bag — hold on, this is odd. Her laptop is missing. I definitely put it back yesterday before I fell asleep. But maybe not, she thinks.

What must they be thinking at the magazine? she wonders. I can’t believe I did that. What the hell is wrong with me? She knows what her father will think: that he was right the whole time.

The lock glows green as her room key slides in, and she opens the door, ready to sink into bed again, defeated. Instead she stands frozen in the doorway, staring at the shape inside her room, blackened by the light streaming in from the curtained window. It is bent over her desk, rummaging through her other handbag.

It too freezes, turning to face her. She can’t see its features, but feels surprise and alarm radiate from its shape. She backs away.

And then it’s gone. He darts out past her, handbag in hand, and runs down the hall — a short, gaunt figure, its soft footfalls rhythmic in the narrow hall.

It happens so fast she can barely process it. She stands still in shock a moment. Without thinking she bolts after him, dropping everything in her still open doorway.

He pushes through the lobby door as if through cling wrap, and she follows, neither heeding the outraged calls of the desk staff. Outside, though, she halts, hitting a wall of light. The day has brightened even more by now, and she can barely see the figure as it slips around the corner, through a narrow space between the yellow building and ranks of fenced-off dunes.

Haven follows. The farther she runs the closer the thicket presses in from both sides, lush green stalks grasping to overtake the sand-covered walk. Ranks of sea oats and dollarweed, daggers of yucca, spindly passion flowers hanging from vines, all glimpsed in a blur of motion. She reaches the beach and stumbles, kicks off her shoes, grateful she hadn’t worn heels.

The figure is even farther away now, but shorn of her shoes, Haven is gaining on him. Her mind is clear of thought, filled instead with a searing rage. She has no idea what she’ll do if she catches him, nor has even considered it.

A brief, half-finished idea flits through her that the island is not long, and the hotel is near its southern end. There is nowhere for him to go.

Still the form flees, borne on those swift, slender legs. She can hear her things clattering inside her bag, and she focuses more on the sound than on the sight of him. The dunes rise, their faces blunt from where storms have carved them away, then fall gently. And round a corner, where the beach dog-legs, a stand of trees appears. White and smooth like bones. Shorn of any leaf or living thing.

She halts. Stares up at them. They seem a strange and alien thing, something she’s never expected to see. Wind-worn, skeletal. It seems like a place of death. For a moment she forgets the thief, lost in her awe.

Only a moment, though. She begins to run again, but she’s lost sight of him now. Her feet pound the soft, warm ripples, making no sound. The island narrows, as it has been doing for a while, though she hadn’t noticed. Soon it’s only a narrow spit, then it fails altogether, giving way to a calm blue inlet. A ring of ripples churns the water near the edge then fades away, lapping at the sand with jittery waves.

There is no one here. Haven is alone.

She turns, scans the fringe of the island. Salt flats stretch toward the creek, covered in places by fans of sand pushed inland. No trees, no tall brush, nowhere to hide. Only a small strip of beach and the lagoon, and the ocean. Not until now has she noticed its own sighing, soughing sound, calm and eternal.

There is no hint of the figure. She recalls its silhouetted shape again, short and gaunt. She shivers, in spite of the warm sun on her skin. There is nothing more left to do here.

On the way back, she marvels again at the strangeness of the white trees, so stark and graceful in their stillness. She walks around the largest of them, traces its bony smoothness with her fingertips, lets her touch linger in one of its curves. Her eyes close, and she leans her head against it, filled with defeat. Twice today she has failed herself, and there seems no sense to make of it.

Haven kneels then rests her back against its trunk. Imagines the tide rising and cooling her tired feet. Her fingers splay in the sand on either side of her, reveling in its texture. They brush against something hard, and she opens her eyes to look.

A black flute of glass. She grasps and pulls, digging until the sand releases a wide, bulbous shape. Haven brushes it off, strains to see through the clouded hull. Something swirls inside, wakened by her hand, dark as the bottle itself.

Sure, she thinks, staring at her find. Because why not?

She carries the bottle back to the hotel, picks up her shoes as she finds them. They are farther apart than she remembers. Every step feels slow and heavy, as if somehow she has become someone else.

At least she has the bottle. Haven grips it tightly. She has no bottle opener, but she already has an idea about that. Fishing her Swiss army knife from her car’s glove box, she sits in the passenger’s seat and uses the thin blade to work around the edge of the cork, then stabs it, twists, and pulls it out.

Rum. She can tell immediately by the scent rising from the open neck. A scent, she thinks, that has lain in secret for centuries. It’s almost overpowering. Haven nearly feels drunk from the smell alone.

She thumbs a patch of barnacles on the glass, waits a moment before raising the neck to her lips, and drinks.

* * *

Somehow it is dark, and she is grateful. The last rays of sunlight have been spears in her eyes as she sat at the foot of the bed and drank, sip by sip — the rum is strong — and waited for the day to fade. The hotel room is silent. If she had got the balcony she’d hoped for the door might be open now, the sound of waves slipping in to soothe her. But Haven doesn’t want soothing. Only the freedom and misery the bottle will bring.

Other sounds drift in, though. Footfalls creak from the floor above. Voices of teenage girls in the room next to hers, their effervescent laughter. She resents their happiness.

What am I doing? Why did I choke today? Why did I even come here? Did I really think I could—

Her phone rings, and Haven groans, hearing the ringtone. She nearly doesn’t answer, thinking of the friction sure to follow, and then does, for the same reason. “Hello.”

The caller hesitates before speaking. “Did I wake you, hon? I didn’t think you’d be sleeping this early.”

The breath comes heavy into her lungs. She has no answer for this, and the gulf in their words feels unbearable. She knows what he must be thinking, resents him for not saying it aloud. She knows he wants to. How disappointed he must be!

There is static on the line a moment, then a new voice speaks. “How’s your trip, sweetie?”

Her eyes close. “I’m fine, Momma. It’s going great.”

“That’s good. You know I worry.”

“I do. How are you?”

“Not the best. It’s been a hard day. Dad made waffles, but I could only eat one. I didn’t get out of bed much, either.”

Haven’s brow creases. She presses her forehead. “Why not?”

“Well, I just really didn’t have a whole lot to do. There didn’t seem much point in it.”

It’s not the words so much as the way her mother says them. Her tone is that same singsong drawl, proud yet sweet, but the color is leached out of it, the energy sapped away. It sounds something near to giving up.

“You know you need to move more, Momma. Need to get your strength up if you want to get better.” She hopes she can’t hear, or doesn’t notice, the tired slur in her own words.

“I know,” her mother answers without much conviction. “Here’s Dad.”

“I don’t know what to do for her, Haven,” her father’s voice returns. “She won’t eat or move around much, and I can’t convince her to do anything. You know how she is.”

Haven does know. She loves her mother, but she has never been the easiest woman to live with. She takes another swallow of rum.

“Our door is always open, hon. I know you’re excited to be on your own, but…your mother needs you. She would like it if you were here. An awful lot.”

“Of course I would,” he stammers, surprised. “You know I — Look, Haven, I don’t know what I’ll do if she’s not around. And you know, lots of people do gap years.”

“Before college, Dad. Not after.”

“You know,” he presses, “I helped out my dad around the shop when his knee gave out, and I worked at the same time. You could still—”

“Dad, you had time for that.” Her tone is rising, but she doesn’t care. She screws her eyes shut, tries to speak clearly and emphatically. “You didn’t have crippling debt right after college. I haven’t even found a job yet! You act like I’m so privileged, but you’re the one who had it easy. Things have changed.”

He doesn’t grow angry, doesn’t lash out at her. Part of her is even more angry at him for this. “Things may have changed,” he says at last. “For you, and me alike. And most of all for your mother.”

“I know what you’re doing,” she seethes. “I know, and I’m not — you don’t even care, do you? You don’t understand how much I need this. How much pressure I have to start my career, to—”

Her phone beeps. The line goes dead. Did he hang up on her, or did she hang up on him? She doesn’t remember. Haven stares at her phone for what seems hours, but it has only been minutes. Time is dilating and it’s nowhere near midnight. The rum is half gone. It no longer looks appealing. Just the smell of it drifting out of the bottle on the floor makes her sick.

She doesn’t want to be drunk anymore. Haven just wants to be anywhere but here, anyone but her.

* * *

It isn’t the sunlight, dazzling as it is, or her phone alarm, not set to go off for an hour or two, or even the noise of the air conditioner that wakes her. It’s the pain. Somewhere behind each of her eyes, a miniature sun is exploding.

Haven gives the rum bottle a glance and grimaces. She wonders if she ought to take a sip — hair of the dog and all that. But no. She won’t touch the stuff again.

She tries rising, but the movement only makes the pain worse. Her head sinks into the cool comfort of the pillow, but that position hurts just as much. Oh well. She has to do something. She needs food, the one and only hangover cure she’s ever known to work. And that, excruciating as it may be, means going outside.

Two Excedrin and a cup of stale, hotel lobby coffee later, Haven stumbles along the island’s central street and into the Crab House, a blue-painted wooden shack. Seafood does not sound good for breakfast, but it’s the first place she’s found, and another minute outside feels like torture. She tries not to press her brow ridge too hard as the hostess seats her — at the bar, of all places.

“What can I get you, hon?” the waitress asks

“The pimento cheeseburger is good,” a voice beside her murmurs, “if it’s a hangover cure you want. And the fried pickles, too.”

“Thanks,” she replies. “What he said. And a Coke.”

The food when it comes is heavy, greasy, and glorious. It’s been a while since Haven has eaten this bad, but every fiber of her body is calling out for it. It’s just what she needs. Between it, the coffee, and the pills, her migraine begins to fade some forty minutes after the last bite. The relief is almost a high in itself, even through the fog of lingering pain. She still feels halfway dead, but the worst part is over.

Finally she’s aware enough to take in her surroundings. She glances right, toward the source of the voice, and spots a familiar face, though she can’t place him. Lime green t-shirt, black swimming trunks with a tricolored floral pattern. Deep, dark eyes that are watching her, half in amusement, half in concern.

“I saw you yesterday,” he says. “Out on the beach. You’re wearing the same clothes now that you were then.”

Haven winces, looking over the water-stained pants and rumpled top, both scattered with sand. She has no idea what happened to her blazer. She shrugs. Right now it’s kind of hard to care.

She studies the guy again, and then places him: the metal detector guy from her first day here. He’s younger than she had first thought.

“I saw you, too. Not yesterday — the day before. You were panning for gold, I guess. Sunken pirate treasure?”

He laughs and his eyes glint, his head tilts. Haven runs a hand through her stringy, oily hair. Something about him intrigues her.

“No, it’s not that glamorous, actually. Just a hobby.”

“And what do you usually find?”

He rolls his eyes. “What don’t I find? Trash, mostly. Bottle caps, soda cans, foil, bobby pins, sometimes even nails, believe it or not — I don’t know what people are building here on the beach — a bullet casing, once. Coins. But sometimes jewelry. Rings, mostly. And earrings.”

“Do you sell it, or collect it?”

The guy looks surprised. “I give it back to them, usually. Unless I’m out there on my own time.”

Haven frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I’m in this group.” He sips his mojito. “You can look me up on the website. We find people’s lost weddings rings for them.”

She sits straight. It’s never occurred to her that people might set up a service like that, but it makes sense. But the thought is replaced immediately by another. “Can you find something for me?”

Now he looks taken aback. “Um. Sure, I mean, I’ve already been out today but I can go again.” He checks the clock behind the bar. “You know where the pier is? By the hotel? Can you meet me there in fifteen minutes?”

She slips off the barstool, signals for her check. “Absolutely.”

He smiles again, that same tilted-head smile, and offers his hand. “I’m Efren,” he says.

“Haven.”

“Good to meet you, Haven,” his smile widens, hearing her name. “I’ll see you soon.”

* * *

Forty-six minutes later, they stand on the edge of the spit, the island’s last gasp, looking out on the inlet. The tide is low now, and they can see pluff mud beneath where the water had been, a relic of the island’s former shape. Haven’s headache is entirely gone; which is good, since the sun has not dimmed at all.

Efren sweeps the metal detector from side to side, pausing to mark the places he’s covered with his sand scoop.

“What makes you think it’s buried here?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Where else could it be? He just disappeared here, there’s no place he could have gone. He had to have hidden it somewhere.”

“Unless he threw it in the water. I’m guessing he jumped in, too.”

Haven shakes her head. “Maybe. But he couldn’t have just held his breath that long, and I’d have seen him swimming away, wouldn’t I? And wouldn’t the tide have pushed the bag back to shore, anyway?”

He stops, and his head jerks toward her. “I’ve got something,” he says, pulling the earphones off and handing them to her. She listens as he sweeps the round coil over the sand again. Two sharp beeps.

Efren is already digging. The barrel of his scoop sinks into the beach, then rises to let the sand sift out the bottom. He doesn’t have to go for long before they find something.

Many somethings, actually. And not just metal. Haven kneels and squints into the hole. Lipstick tubes, unopened condoms, a pocket mirror, a change purse. A nearly empty tube of bug spray. Efren bends and pulls out something squarish. “Haven’t seen one of these in a while,” he says. She looks. An iPod nano, the paint on the aluminum casing worn away to dull silver. “Looks like someone’s stash.”

“More like trash.” She looks up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Who would keep all stuff?”

Efren doesn’t answer. He kneels behind her, digs a bit with his hands. A few more objects surface. Strips of photo negatives. Two keyrings, cheap reading glasses. A Shirley Jackson paperback, waterlogged and thoroughly yellowed.

“Maybe it’s just random,” she says.

His head shakes. “I’ve never seen this much stuff clustered all together. Look, I’ll bet it goes even deeper than this. Maybe wider, too.”

Haven stands. Wind flings salt spray into her hair, making it even more unkempt. Efren watches her as if waiting, but she doesn’t know what to say. Is there anything to say? I can’t make sense of anything here. A few feet away, inches deep in the water, she spots two crabs, a hermit dismantling the shell of a larger blue. Out beyond that, the fin of a dolphin arcs from the water then vanishes. Haven sighs.

She turns from the ebbing sea and looks Efren full on. “I found something out here, too,” she says. “I’ll show you, if you want to see.”

The walk back to the hotel is a slow one, even slower than the walk out. It hadn’t felt this long when she’d ran it, chasing the figure from her room. Of all the things she’d hoped for in this trip, none of them had happened. She thinks, for the first time today, of her father’s call last night, and a stab of bitterness touches her. Why is he so helpless? she wonders. Why can’t he take care of her himself? And why’d I even mention my career? The internship’s dead anyway.

Even more of a mystery is what she’s doing with Efren. Asking for help is one thing. But bringing him back to her room?

In the hotel, the hall seems dimmed. Their sandaled feet clack halfheartedly on the tile floor, the only sound. The place feels like a temple. Haven finds her door, opens it, and lets him in.

“Oh, wow,” Efren whispers. He goes straight for the bottle, holds it to the light, studies its many details. “It’s a glass onion.” He turns sharply to her. “You found this? On the beach?”

She sits on the bed. “In the beach, actually. It was buried under those white trees.”

Efren fingers the cork on the desk, then sniffs the bottle’s neck. “Did you drink out of this?” He looks up at her, and Haven nods. His eyebrows raise. A sign of respect, or incredulity?

“Probably best not to again,” he says.

“If you’d had the day I did…” Haven shrugs.

He doesn’t respond, but sits on the desk across from her, searching her eyes. A strange look forms in his features, as if he’s trying to decide something. “Tell me,” he says.

Haven blinks. Should I? Do I trust this guy, who I’ve known for half a day? Clearly part of her does, to have invited him here. She takes a deep breath.

“So many things are pulling at me. Pulling in different directions. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I can do. Or should do. I don’t know if I believe I’m capable of it. And my parents…they’re not supportive. At all. My dad is dragging at me to take care of my mom when he won’t, or can’t. And all this doubt and guilt, they’re toxic. They petrify me. I know all this, but I can’t help feeling it.”

Haven looks away. She wishes now, after that torrent of words, that she hadn’t spoken at all. Efren doesn’t speak. She feels cold here in this room, cold and vulnerable.

“I’m sorry,” Efren says. She looks at him, surprised to see real empathy in his eyes. A long moment passes before he breaks eye contact, glancing again at the black bottle. Haven glares at it.

“Will you take that thing away from me? I should never have brought it here.”

He winces, moving away from it an inch or two. “I’d rather not. It kind of low key gives me the creeps.”

“Then stay with me. I don’t want to be alone here with it.”

Efren nods. He looks out the window at the ragged palmettos, at the grackles haunting their branches, feathers an iridescent black. She wonders if he wishes he were out there, away from her. If he regrets coming here, regrets agreeing to help her at all. He meets her eyes again, nods a second time, stands, and sits on the bed beside her. An awkward moment passes, and he takes her hand in his.

I don’t know anything about you, she thinks. But his hand feels warm, like the warmth of the sun outside, of the sand underfoot this morning.

She makes her decision. Her hand rises to touch his neck, then settles in his ruffled black hair. Her fingers trace the back of his head and she pulls him closer, tastes the salt on lips, the roughness of his stubbled cheek.

“Haven,” he says.

“It’s okay,” she answers. And believes it.

* * *

That night, Haven dreams of faceless shapes. They are watching from outside her window, through the keyhole of her hotel door. Bent and shrunken figures, lean and wasted, nearly blown away by the sea air. The dream gives way to a pod of dolphins that swim the shallows, weaving amongst each other. One is made of clear glass. It leaps from the water, a glass fish in its mouth, and lays on the beach. But it isn’t a dolphin — not anymore. It blackens and liquefies, swirly and sloshing, until a bottle forms around it. One of the windblown figures comes and drinks deeply, leaving it to sink into the sand as if through deep water.

She wakes, gasping and drenched in cold sweat. Her head whips back and forth, scanning the room for danger, but there is none. She sits up for several long moments, heart pounding, and finally laughs, knowing she is safe. The day is underway, and the light is dancing with motes of dust as it streams in through the blinds. The dust seems alive, clean and sacred to her morning eyes.

Then she realizes: Efren is gone. She is alone again. She feels sad at first, sad and bitter, but she rises and walks out to the beach and sees him there, walking its length, metal detector in hand. He spots her as well, smiles, and waves. She smiles, too. The soft sand between her toes mingles with the roughness of sea wrack, and in the dunes the sea oats bob in the wind, the dollarweed gleaming in the sun. The world is itself here, as it always has been. Sky and ocean, limitless.

Haven laughs, feeling lighter somehow. She turns and leaves Efren to his beach.

Will she see him again? It pulls at her, that rootedness he carries, an aura of belonging in this place. A sense of purpose, stability, that makes her yearn for him stronger than before. She keeps walking, not looking back.

In her room again she sits on the bed, lets her thoughts wander. The bottle is still here, but it no longer seems strange or ominous. Mere glass and rum, hoary with age. Haven picks up her phone, swipes through the notifications. She’s missed two calls in her short time outside. Both have left voicemails.

“Haven, it’s your momma. I just want to check in on you, make sure you’re all right. Your dad says y’all were cut off, and we haven’t heard back from you since. I miss you, sweetheart. You know if things aren’t going well, or even if they are, we’d love to have you home again. Rent free. Just for a while. What do you say? We love you. Give us a call back when you can.”

She pauses, hearing a warmth in the recording that makes her feel guilty. She plays the second one.

“Uh, hey, Ms. Roe? It’s Aaron Canberry from Kindred. Just wanted to follow up on your interview. I hope everything’s all right with your family emergency, but we were definitely sorry to see you have to leave so quick. If you’re, uh, still interested in that internship, give me a call, all right? If not, then good luck in your endeavors. Thanks so much!”

Haven stares at the phone for so long that it auto-locks. Of all things, she’d never expected a second chance with them. Not after the way she’d stormed out. She’d felt sure they had seen through her, deep into her core, common and worthless.

She no longer felt that way, though. Not today, at least. But who knew what tomorrow would bring?

Haven stands, paces, then walks back to her bed. She picks up the phone again. Her heart beats loud and heavy, and she wonders which call she should return. Her mother really does need her. She sees that now. However ineffectual her father may be, there is real good that Haven can do. But there is so much she can achieve as well, with a platform like Kindred. It feels like a shining beacon, waiting for her, one that will not stay lit for long.

Her thumb shakes as it hovers over the dial screen. A part of her wonders if there is a right answer, and if so, how she will ever know if she’s chosen it or not. She loves her parents, maddening as they can be.

Whatever she decides, she knows she will regret it.

One final sigh, then she acts. She’s made her choice, and there’s no sense in doubting it now. Haven touches the number on her screen and listens to the distant ring, lonely somehow like the calling of gulls. A voice answers, and for a moment she hears the crashing of waves in her ears before she swallows, closes her eyes, and speaks.

]]>https://mluce.ro/stories/tides/feed/0425The Marsh Ghosthttps://mluce.ro/stories/marshghost/
https://mluce.ro/stories/marshghost/#respondTue, 11 Oct 2016 08:10:25 +0000http://mluce.ro/?p=427Drew climbs out of the truck and whistles as heat blankets him. Though the drive out was comfortably air-conditioned, sweat mists his forehead in moments. He wipes it away. At least the sloped shoulder where he parked is shaded, though he wonders if the trees on either side only trap the sweltering air. He peers up and down the two-lane road, wary of traffic. There is none. Of course, there wouldn’t be. Evening is coming on, and this is no place to be caught after dark.

He would not be here for anything, save that it’s what Ray wants. Drew doesn’t even think he believes in ghosts, but if it will help his brother forget, he will oblige. For now.

A deep breath, then he plunges into the woods. He ducks under hanging vines, strays from the path to avoid ground still muddy from flooding last month. Dwarf palmettos nod in a breeze. He takes a last look over his shoulder, back at the truck. A single tress of Spanish moss wavers over the cab, gilt by fading sunbeams. He shakes his head and walks onward.

Ray had better be there already, Drew thinks. He doesn’t want to wait. Especially not by the marsh at the path’s end where, Ray told him on the phone this morning, you can see the old Marjorie Rutledge Home where the woman still roams the creekside, searching for lost love. He sighs. The whole thing seems a fool’s errand.

It hasn’t always been like this, Ray’s obsession with the paranormal. Though it’s understandable, considering what he has lost. It’s hard not to worry about him, but Drew calms his thoughts. It’s the first time he’s agreed to meet his brother for one of these insane “investigations,” but then again it’s the first time one of them has been on a forest trail, in pure darkness, in the middle of the sticks. He couldn’t let him go alone.

Why does he have to be the stable one? It’s a role Drew resents. He misses the way things were when they were young, both of them bold and reckless. Yes, it’s been worse since the accident. And no, his brother hasn’t been the same since Julia. But Ray, though older, has forced him to be sober and sane for them both.

Drew jumps as something unseen caresses his face. He laughs: only an orb-weaver’s web, likely the only ghost they will find tonight. A mosquito shrills in his ear, but its voice seems far away. As if the sound itself is a haunting.

Far ahead a flashlight beam waves. He can’t see the marsh yet, but Ray has seen him.

* * *

When blue hour comes the forest cools, though Drew’s body is still damp with sweat and warm with the memory of the sun. Ray trudges beside him now, jittery — from coffee or excitement? Hard to tell. He’s had more late nights in recent months than Drew has ever known him to, so it could be both. On his shoulder a black duffle hangs, their last name Sharpie’d onto a grey strap: Underwood.

Ray stops, stares off to the right where the roots of a fallen pine stretch, hopeless arms that reach in vain for heaven. “There,” he whispers. He leans toward his brother and points. “Straight past that is a shortcut to the best spot to see the house from. We can’t go on the grounds itself; it’s privately owned. Across the creek is the closest we can get.”

“I don’t think we should leave the path,” Drew frowns. “It’s going to be dark in under an hour.”

His brother waves him off. “It’s fine,” he says. “I have flashlights, and GPS if we get lost. Plus, I already came out here yesterday to check things out.”

This is new information. At night, or in daylight? Drew isn’t sure their excursion is entirely legal, since he doesn’t know who owns this land. There were private driveways on the road, but no houses to be seen, not from there at least. And none near the mile where they’ve parked. He shakes his head, imagines what Emma would say if she could see them now. He hopes his worries are pointless.

“Who’s this ghost we’re hunting now?” he asks.

“The Rutledge woman. I told you,” Ray says impatiently.

“Tell me again.”

He sighs. “Fine. Marjorie Rutledge. Lived before the Civil War, couple decades maybe. She had a secret affair with a man from a smaller farm, one of her neighbors I think, who’d just moved in from Beaufort. Her father knew of the man and thought he had slave blood in his veins, though you couldn’t tell by looking at him. So Marjorie kept their love a secret. When her father found out, he said nothing. He had the man sent to the peninsula on an errand, I don’t remember what. But…he didn’t return the night he was supposed to.”

Drew waits, knowing his brother enjoys the drama of these stories. He cringes as a narrow vine (muscadine, he thinks) tangles across his sternum, unseen in the gloaming. He swears below his breath.

Ray doesn’t notice. “So Marjorie, she went out to the creek to watch for him — back then they traveled by boat more than by road. Her lover never came back. She laid in bed for days, claiming to see his image in her fever, begging her forgiveness.”

“And?”

“And a few days later, she’s dead. I haven’t discovered why yet,” he adds in an afterthought. “Or how.”

Drew peers at his brother, frowns. There is no hint of grief or pain in his voice, talking this way about death. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? But it doesn’t feel right.

Would Ray be so detached if he were to mention Julia? Drew doesn’t think so. His tongue curls to shape the name, as if her memory wants to be given voice. For a moment its will seems irresistible, but he masters it.

The unspoken name still hovers in the air, though. Ray turns sharply and stares at him as if hearing it.

“What was that?” he says at last. Drew shakes his head. Ray does not break eye contact.

He crouches, brings out a small black device with a screen and lots of options. He presses the small red RECORD button.

Not ten minutes later they reach the path again and soon see the darkened form of a house. It looks lonely from where they stand here, across the creek and the plain of golden marsh. White siding, black-shuddered windows; or the kind of green that’s almost black. Brick columns hold a wide upper porch till it spills down in a flight of white stairs. An old plantation home. Late antebellum, maybe. Emma would know.

“Okay,” Ray says. “Let’s see if we can reach her.”

Three small flashlights emerge from his bag. Cheap ones, the kind you can find at a dollar store. He unscrews the handle of each just enough to get the battery loose, and flips the switches on.

“Hello? Is anyone here with us?”

Drew can barely see the flashlights on the forest floor, but he squints down at them anyway, wondering what to expect.

“If you’re here, you can turn on these lights by touching them. Two flashes for yes, one for no.”

Nothing happens. Drew waits, wonders what Ray is thinking. He begins to let his thought drift off, remembering how they’d kayaked creeks like this nearer to home with their parents. How once, when both were so much younger, Ray had rowed so far ahead that Drew could not see them past a bend in the marsh, and for what had seemed like hours (probably no more than minutes) they had sat in stillness watching a white bird stand still as a statue. “Hello, Mr. Egret,” Drew had sung out. The way he’d formed the words sounded like Mister Regret. Drew smiles, remembering how Ray had laughed at that for days after.

A slow yawn sneaks his breath away. He clears his throat, wonders how long they will stay here and wait — when the first bulb ignites. One, then another. The third, for whatever reason, remains off.

He watches, mouth gaping. Ray smiles and nods, reaches again into his bag.

“Are you looking for something?” he asks. “Or maybe someone?”

The light flashes twice.

“Did someone important to you disappear?”

Twice again.

Ray grins, unable to speak. His breathing quickens. He holds another device up and numbers blink on its pale screen. Drew doesn’t know what they are, but the numbers make him shiver.

“Hold this,” his brother commands, and Drew accepts a small camera. He watches a psychedelic array of yellows and oranges and purples form and shift, till he recognizes the shapes of trees and then Ray himself.

“It’s a thermal camera,” Ray sputters. “Measures heat differences. See if you can see anything in it.”

Drew squints into the mess of color as Ray queries on. “Have you been here long? Since the eighteen-hundreds?” Two flashes. Still nothing on the camera but the cold creek and marsh, a stray crab or two climbing in the stalks.

He looks up. The world is dim around them. Dark has fallen; he hasn’t noticed when, but it is here. Something snaps in the marsh grass. He can see movement there, but no shape. His throat closes. A chill creeps over his sweat-damp back.

“Did you die of lost love?” One flash. Ray frowns. “Maybe it’s not her.” Another flash, weaker this time.

“Do you see anything on the camera? Point it at the flashlights.”

There is nothing to see on the screen, not even the now flickering beams.

“Damn,” Ray swears. “Nothing on the EMF, either.”

Nothing else happens after this. Ray makes a few recordings, takes more readings with his instruments. He doesn’t seem disappointed. He tells Drew this is how things usually go. A lot of work and little to show for it. But it’s the hunt that matters, he says.

Drew doesn’t see it. He’s never been a hunter. Nor has Ray, for that matter — not before his girlfriend died and he couldn’t seem to stay still a single hour. He remembers his brother’s face when Julia’s father called him to let him know she was gone. The broken look that had swam in his eyes.

It’s gone now, that look, but something else is in its place. Drew isn’t sure what just yet. This sort of chase, the relentless search his brother is caught up in — something about it bothers Drew. He feels unnerved, but doesn’t know why.

He walks Ray back to his sedan, a hundred feet or so ahead of where his own truck is parked. The road is still empty, but now it looks smaller, more remote. Its own little world in the dark, no street light at all. It’s an intimate loneliness. Does Ray feel it, too?

Ray climbs into his car. “Give you a ride back to your truck?” he asks. Drew shakes his head.

“What’s that?” he asks, catching sight of something red on his brother’s arm. Ray blinks, studies his inner wrist: a small constellation of red mounds.

“Damn bloodsuckers,” he says.

* * *

A phone call wakes him in the morning, a full hour before he’d planned to rise. He throws off sheets raveled around him, grabs the glowing screen, presses the glass to his stubbled cheek. “Hello,” he murmurs.

“Drew? Is that you?”

He sits up, eyes wide and alert. “Emma! I forgot to call yesterday.”

“I knew you would,” her voice creaks in that way he loves. “It’s fine. I had a great time Friday night.” She hesitates. “It’s been too long, Drew.”

He agrees. He thinks of her often. Even when they’re broken up, which is not infrequent, he wonders if she will come back soon. They know each other too well, after all. Good and bad. He winces, catching an angle of sunlight that glares in through his window. It blinds him like her own image would if she were here now, her black hair and olive skin and darkened eyes.

“How did the thing go?” she asks.

“Thing?” He knows what she means, but makes her say it.

“With Ray. The ghost thing.”

“Mm. About what I thought. Tripping through the woods in pitch dark, like a couple of moonshiners.”

Emma snickers. He pictures the tilt of her head, the smile lines that form when she laughs. He can nearly see it.

“I almost wish I’d been there for that,” she says. “I’m glad you went with him. How did he seem?”

He draws a breath to answer, but it sticks in his throat. He isn’t quite sure what to say. He’d seemed like Ray, for one thing — for one of the first times he can remember in a good while. And there’d been a light in his eyes that was new. A light Drew has never seen there before. It pulls at his mind, nagging.

“I mean,” Emma says, “These ghosts of his—”

“There was no ghost, Emma. The cake is a lie.”

She’s silent a moment. He wonders if his tone was harsher than he’d meant. “I’m just worried about him,” she says. “I mean, this isn’t something you just get over. They were made for each other. That’s rare.”

He seems to hear a wistfulness in her voice, one he almost resents. Then resents himself for feeling it. “I am too, babe. But I really think he’s fine. Or will be fine. Give him a while. It’s been, what, a few months? He’s coping with it in his own way.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. He’s not coping. What he’s doing, what y’all were doing — that’s not coping. It’s running away from the world.”

Drew frowns. He knows somehow that she is right, but doesn’t want to admit it. He remembers vividly how alive and present Ray was. Nevertheless. “Maybe,” he allows. “Maybe he is. I’ll talk to him.”

“Drew,” she murmurs. “Just look out for him, is all I’m saying.”

Her words stick in his head the rest of the morning. He wolfs down cold pizza, showers quickly, and sits under the fan on full-hurricane-blast at his computer. Pulls up Google, types:

ghost hunting debunked

172,000 results. He swears.

But Drew is patient. He can’t get this niggling thought out of his head, anyway, nor the memory of last night. He sees lights flashing in his mind’s eye, shakes them out of his head. Did you die of lost love? Have you been here for long?

* * *

An hour later, he’s satisfied. He’d felt unnerved before, but it’s amazing how quickly that fades when you have answers. It all comes down to thermodynamics. Flashlights generate light and heat, heat causes expansion, breaking the circuit and cooling the insides. Cooling causes contraction, which pulls the insides together, forming a circuit again — and on and on. Basic physics. Not ghosts.

His phone vibrates. A text from Ray.

come rn

u need 2 c this

Drew stops for a cold-brew on the way, revels as the caffeine enters his bloodstream. He would offer to buy Ray something, but the guy is probably jacked up enough. Traffic slows on the way over. His fingers thrum the wheel, then stop. He stares at them. Is he nervous? He’s never been one for such idle habits. But what is there to be nervous about?

No one answers when he knocks at Ray’s apartment, so he lets himself in. Signs of neglect abound. It hadn’t been this bad when he was last here, a week ago maybe. Books lay stacked or left open, spines up, around the sofa. Empty beer bottles line shelves and tables. A smell wafts out from the kitchen, unwashed dishes, mingling with the vapor from his brother’s e-cig, faint and sickly sweet. He cringes.

“Oh, hey,” Ray stumbles out from the hallway. He seems surprised to see Drew.

“Bit distracted lately?”

“No, no. Just have a lot of things running through my mind.” His eyes flit here and there across the apartment, but if the mess embarrasses him it doesn’t show.

“I know what you mean. I forgot to call Emma yesterday.”

Ray shoots him a look. “Emma Flores? Y’all are back together again?”

“Yeah, we went out Friday night. Didn’t I tell you that?”

His brother seems unsure for a moment. His eyes glaze over, his lips part. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess maybe you did.” He gives a playful smirk, and again he is the same familiar Ray. “Well, good luck to you.”

“Ray,” Drew warns.

“What? I didn’t say a thing.”

Drew sighs. “So. What is it I need to see?”

“Well…hear, actually. Let me pull it up.”

Ray grabs his notebook from the coffee table and turns it on. “Okay, here it is. Listen closely.”

Drew listens. There isn’t much to hear. The notebook’s speaker sings the droning of insects, the faraway rasping of frogs. A breeze whispers, sounding halfway like static. Then Drew hears his own voice. “I didn’t hear a thing—” Then the frantic hiss of his brother.

Ray sighs, exasperated. “It’s there. You just have to listen. It says, ‘He will return’.”

Drew sits on the sofa’s arm. His lips purse, and he wonders what to say. “Listen, I’ve been reading about things like this,” he begins. “They have different names for it. Matrixing, apophenia. It’s when the brain imposes order and meaning on something where there isn’t anything there. And there’s something called confirmation bias: when you cling to anything that fits what you expect, but reject anything that doesn’t as irrelevant.”

He remembers it clearly, the ocean-blue electric guitar his brother had saved for for years, setting aside what he could from late-night coffee shop or bar gigs he’d scraped together, long before his graveyard shift job at the Vendue as night auditor. Drew had been one of the few to see him play it the first time. He and Julia and Emma. Normally it hung over the mantle, between a bookshelf and a potted cactus, but the space was empty now. It had the air of a mural that had been painted over and forgotten.

“Sold it,” Ray grunts. “How else do you think I can afford all this equipment?”

It feels like a punch in the gut. Drew’s eyes flutter closed and he draws a deep breath, wishing this wasn’t happening. He glances at the mantle again, studies a photo of Ray and Julia smiling, her small hand pressed against his chest. Drew stands.

“I’m sorry, Ray,” he murmurs. “I’m not going to help you with this anymore. I can’t…I just can’t do this.”

Ray’s gaze rises toward his brother, pulling Drew’s own attention back to him. Neither speak, but neither have to. A long span of time slips by before Drew takes the first step away, clunky and awkward in his ears, and leaves his brother alone.

* * *

He feels guilty as soon as he leaves, but there’s no help for that. Ray is set on a course he cannot stop, is living in a world he cannot reach. Nor had he ever had much luck in swaying his brother’s mind. When Ray is set on something, you either climb aboard or jump ship.

It’s fine, he tells himself. This ghost thing will lose its appeal and he’ll run out of steam eventually. And when he does, I’ll be there.

He shakes the thought from his head, turns on the radio. Traffic is heavy, more than usual. It’s going to be a long drive home.

For the next week or so he passes by Ray’s apartment when he can, and monitors his social media, which tends to be inactive. This isn’t unusual. Ray is more concerned with living life than documenting it, a trait Drew both admires and envies. Again he asks himself: why does he get to be impulsive, the irrepressible free spirit? Why should I color inside the lines just because he never can?

Such thoughts do not erase his guilt, nor ease his concern.

And they only grow when he speaks of Ray to Emma on Thursday night in his car, on their way to tacos at Santi’s.

“I saw him at the library yesterday,” he says, “but he didn’t even acknowledge my wave. He looked right through me. I don’t think he even saw me.”

Emma smiles ruefully. “I’m sure he’s just in his own head,” she says.

“He’s been that way more and more. I don’t know, Em. Do you think I was wrong? Maybe I should fight harder for him, help him with whatever he needs me for.”

She studies him as his Nissan slows for a red light. “You’re his brother,” she says. “If you don’t stick close to him, who will?”

Drew doesn’t respond. His brow furrows, laden with the weight of his thoughts. “He’s never been like this. Unfocused, imbalanced.”

“No. Not before Julia. They were so happy.”

“And healthy. At the library, he was covered in bites again, more than last time. I think he’s been going back out into the woods without me.”

Emma is silent at this. It feels like she wants to speak, but no words come.

“Don’t worry,” he rushes, “I won’t let it happen again.”

“Drew, I’m not sure I want you out there, either. You could contract zika, either one of you. There’s been what, forty-some cases in the state this year? Up in Myrtle, then in Florence, even as far as the Upstate. It’s definitely spreading.”

Drew makes the turn onto Meeting. They are nearly there. He smiles. “Aww, that’s sweet, babe, but I don’t think you need to worry about that. It’s just a mild flu.”

“Unless we’re pregnant.”

He brakes, harder than he needs to, as they pull into a parking spot at the restaurant. He searches her face, half stunned. “A-are you?”

“No,” she shakes her head. “But what if we wanted to?”

“Do we?”

She bites her lip. Thinks for a long time.

“Babe, I want to tell you something. Something I’ve never told anyone else. I don’t think even Ray knows. I don’t think she had the chance to tell him.”

He frowns, confused. “Okay.”

“Julia… When she died on that highway, she…” Emma swallows. “Drew, Julia was pregnant.”

* * *

It takes Drew a few days to find some pretext to visit again. In the end, he can’t think of one, and it is Ray who comes to him.

“Hey,” Drew greets his brother, finding him parked by his truck in the lot outside work. “I didn’t expect to see you any time soon.”

“You’re my brother,” Ray smiles faintly. “I’m not going to cut you off just because you ditched me. Besides, I need you out there. We have to go again — out to the marsh.”

Drew laughs, but feels no humor.

“Listen, I know we don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. But I’ve taken a page from your book. I’ve done some research. And I’ve found something.”

“You’ve found something,” he repeats dumbly.

Ray smiles. Drew can see the glow in his eyes even behind the Aviators. “A connection. Something real. It’s even documented.”

Drew is intrigued. He’s certain whatever his brother has dug up won’t convince him, but he shrugs. “Okay, let’s see it.”

Ray fishes a library book from the passenger side of his car, an old cloth-bound green tome with thoroughly yellowed pages and crabbed type. He flips through, finds the gas station receipt he’d used as a bookmark, and points halfway down the left-hand page. “Here,” he taps the book and hands it to Drew, who reads:

Joseph’s letters show high ambition for his daughter’s fortunes, and a keen insight into her worth as a bride. His intention was to marry her to a neighboring planter family, the Jenkinses, whose holdings would have doubled the estate he’d inherited from his father, Branford Rutledge. Tragically, Marjorie died of malaria when she was sixteen years old, just before the family was to leave for their summer house in the pine forests to the north.

Drew reads on, but finds no further mention of Marjorie Rutledge. He sighs. “I’m not going to guess, Ray. What the hell does this prove?”

Ray shakes his head, grins. “She died of malaria,” he says. He waits a moment. “Don’t you see? It was her! The ghost. I thought it wasn’t, since she said she didn’t die of lost love. One flash when I asked, remember? But she didn’t. She was telling us the truth the whole time.”

“Telling us?” Drew’s eyebrow raises. “Ray, that’s a stretch.”

“Okay, maybe, but you saw. You were there, Drew. You saw.”

“Ray, I didn’t see anything. You know I don’t really believe—”

“Don’t believe what?” There is a manic look in his eyes.

Drew throws up his hands. He doesn’t want to do this a second time. It’s not why he’s here, having this conversation when he could have been halfway home by now. No, he’s here for Ray.

He thinks: Malaria, huh? And now we have zika. With all the ways people have advanced in the centuries since Marjorie’s death, mosquitoes are still wreaking havoc on us. Only zika won’t kill you.

“You want to go out there again?” he asks. “Okay. But this time we’re bringing bug spray.”

* * *

They ride together this time, in Drew’s truck, with all of Ray’s things in the back of the cab. There is more traffic today, and the hour is earlier. It’s a concession Ray has made. “There’s no reason,” Drew had argued some days before, “why ghosts would be more active at night. And if they’re shadowy and pale like people say, why would you look when there’s no light to see by?”

Ray can see the reason in this. He sits back, lost in the hypnotic sight of tree after tree slipping by as they drive the narrow road. Drew glances at him, wonders.

Should he tell Ray? Emma didn’t say not to. Surely he has a right to know.

Then again, the loss of Julia has been painful enough. Is it right to add to Ray’s grief with the loss of his child as well?

Why is it that Ray is obsessed with ghosts? With a start, he realizes he has never stopped to ask himself the question. Not to find proof of an afterlife, he thinks. Ray has faith in that already, though he seldom talks about it. It has to be something else. Something more.

Maybe, he thinks, maybe ghosts linger (if they do) not because they cannot let go of this world, but because this world cannot let go of them.

They arrive at the path, and Drew parks his truck beneath the oaks again. Their feet make half-hearted sounds as they crush dead leaves and mats of orange needles. The air all but clings to them, full of damp fingers whose heat they can feel in their skin. They pass a palmetto, shaded and mournful, its trunk scarred.

Ray glances at him with appraising eyes and Drew smiles, reassuring him. Whatever it is he believes or doesn’t believe in, he believes in his brother. Or wants to. Is he doing the wrong thing? Is he helping at all, being here?

A black smear drifts across his face, and he ducks. He looks again. A mosquito, bigger than the kind he’s used to seeing. He’s heard of them before, though he’s never seen one, these zebra-striped, feather-legged things. They’re subtle and mean. And relentless.

Except when Off is part of the equation. He smirks as he sprays and the insect falls away.

They are quiet as they make their way to the marsh. Ray stops every now and then, checks his EMF detector, makes a note in his Moleskine. Drew watches him. He doesn’t know what to say, how to contribute. He’s just happy, he realizes, to be here with his brother. To not have lost him when Ray has lost so much.

The marsh lies close ahead, brimming with scents of mud and silt and the effluence of life. The shrimp are snapping in the water. Frogs sing unknowable songs in their alien voices. Ray takes his voice recorder out, switches it on.

Then a motion catches his eye. At first he can’t see it. The air itself seems to move, but it isn’t the air, it’s a cloud of insects. Mosquitos. They gather in the space between Drew and Ray and take on a shape, a flowing, billowy shape, a figure half forgotten by the past. They hover there, holding their form. An arm swarms upward and gestures to Ray, who has just spotted it.

His mouth opens, wordless. He steps toward the shape. A single mosquito flees the beckoning finger, lands on his outstretched hand. Drew is just close enough to see it bite him, then fly away.

The swarm wavers. Ray steps closer. A breeze flits under the shade of the live oaks and strokes Drew’s brow. It seems to make the shape’s long hair flutter.

“Marjorie,” Ray whispers.

“Ray,” Drew warns. “Listen to me.”

The shape trembles again, then scatters. The insects vanish into the forest, drunk with their burdens of blood. “No,” Ray calls after them. “Marjorie. Don’t leave!”

Drew wants to reach out, to place his hand on his brother’s shoulder, but the shoulder is gone.

“Ray! Ray, no! Stop!”

His brother’s footsteps clatter off into the woods, ringing in Drew’s ears. And somehow Drew cannot move.

Then he does. He runs after, spotting a flash of his brother’s orange shirt. His pace quickens. He can see motion now, ahead through the press of pines and palms, but no color. He is catching up, though. “Ray!” he shouts. “Stay with me! Ray, wait!”

Drew dodges a low-hanging oak branch, leaps over a ditch dulled with standing water. He halts. This is it. The place where Ray had been. He should be here.

Trees surround him. Trees and orb weavers and the slow clambering of possums. But Ray is gone.

“Ray!” he gives a mournful shout.

Drew shivers with energy, and with something else as well. He is surprised at how cool the afternoon has grown. The heat has broken, giving way to that relief and resignation that come with the Lowcountry autumn. A release of tension. He stops, calls again after his brother. “Ray!” There is no answer.

Evening is falling. The woods are empty, hushed. The sky is clear of clouds, but the waning moon is faint as it rises.

The sound the stone made as it chipped the old oak was dull and hollow. That was good. It made Ben feel better somehow, more shielded from the world. He wondered at that. The wide yard, the house far away, the low-hanging, moss-clad arms of the oak over the marsh: all had been friends all his life, witness to his hottest summers and chillest winters. Why were they so distant now? Their minds elsewhere, when he needed them more today than ever?

His aunt was lying in the guest bed back in the house. All the others crowded around her. Not Ben. She was dying, and he had no words for that. No reference.

Dying was something you did in movies, video games. This was more real. Too real. Its realness made him shrink away, unable somehow to meet its eyes.

Ben threw another stone. It thunked off the oak’s ancient bole, trailed off somewhere on the sandy ground, lost in a tangle of fallen moss. He picked up another. Not a stone this time: an oyster shell, bony and pale. His wrist curved, he spun it through the air. It caught in the oak’s blocky grooves, and Ben smirked.

He sighed. The feat should have made him feel good, but it didn’t. The shell sticking out so clear to his eye only vexed him more.

“What do I say?” he wondered aloud. “What do I tell her? What would she ask me?”

The oak gave no reply, just the breeze in its massive branches.

Ben frowned. Reached for another stone, but found his hand frozen. By the roots of the tree, out from the ranks of golden marsh grass, a boar shuffled, its fur brindled brown-black. Its eye was glassy, cool, dark, but the light in it was feral. And it saw him.

His heart twisted. He couldn’t move. The boar seemed to chuckle, and swung its head, showing both tusks. It leaned forward, bowed slowly. For a moment, no motion. Then somehow, before he saw it, the trampling hooves charged, aiming to gore.

He shut his eyes and braced for the pain.

It never came. Instead, a hard, supple jerk on his ankle, and the feeling of soaring, tumbling through air.

When his eyes opened again he was in the marsh, arms and legs smeared with pluff mud. The smell rose to his nostrils: an odor of grace, of bliss, of dank life mingling on his limbs, flowing in his veins. A long time passed between standing again and climbing the bank out of the marsh. He listened. No sound save the snapping of shrimp in the creek, the braying of blackbirds. The buzzing of dragonflies. His ears rang. He sniffed.

There was no sign of the boar. The oak stretched marvelously above as always, its creekside arms dipped low over the water. What had happened? That boar had been running for him. His blood should be decked over its snout now, war paint for its tusks. But it was gone, and he’d been flung away into the marsh.

By who? The oak?

Ben stared up at it. Remembered the firm, brittle grasp on his leg. He shivered. Could this day get any stranger?

Then he saw it. A red door in the side of the oak, just tall enough to enter if he ducked. It stood open. Ben whistled.

“Well,” he said aloud. “This doesn’t look sketchy at all.”

Toward the door, stretching like a sign, ran tracks he hadn’t noticed before. Cloven and shallow in the sand, they looked like little flowers stained in places with red and matted fur.

He was drawn by them. On, through the red door, to wherever the boar had gone. The world felt alive. Gone was the hollowness he’d felt minutes ago. His fingertips tingled.

The house, though…? His family. And Aunt Dell…

Ben brushed the thought away. Drew his eyes from the place where his family waited. He couldn’t think of that now. Didn’t want to, with all that had happened. A door that led who knew where? Away from here.

That’s where he needed to be. Away.

He climbed through the low arch, looked back at the light behind him a last time.

* * *

The tunnel wound and curved and bent many times. There was no way to see what it was made of, whether wood or earth or clay or stone. But Ben could feel. It felt like cord, but then like coarse velvet. Then hard and smooth. No branching ways led off from the passage; it was going where it wanted, and taking him with it.

And then, a light. Distant and filtered, but plain to his dark-sharpened eyes.

He climbed into the light of day, and gaped, not believing what he saw. It was no burrow in the mud bank he’d come out into, no neighbor’s yard or drainage gutter. Ben looked back. The opening he’d come through stared back at him through the roots of a fallen tree, another oak, it seemed. Dead and rotten many years. Vines nearly choked the tunnel. And all around him, a forest.

There was something wrong. He heard no sounds of animals, not even a squirrel barking. No sounds of people, either. The place was silent, still. And more: he’d grown up on this island, knew all its secret places, still stole away on summer mornings to play at pirates and Jedis with his friends in the pinewoods behind school.

This was not one of those places.

It felt familiar, and foreign. Palmettos grew here amid oaks, and at their feet dwarf palms stood, but moved in no wind. There was salt in the air. And soft sighing.

No, not sighing: waves. So he was on a sea island, then, with a beach nearby.

That was even more alarming. The sea islands were miles from home — across rivers and stretches of endless salt marsh. The tunnel hadn’t been nearly long enough to go that far.

Ben rubbed his eyes. His friends would never believe it. But they didn’t have to. He could bring them here, show them the tunnel. A new secret to share.

Maybe not Ryan, though.

He stepped forward. Followed the boar tracks, themselves treading a clear path through the maritime wood. The boar had come here, too, then. From the tracks, it still bled.

There was still no trace of animals. Ben walked a while, stopped at times to peer around him, scanning for anything but trees and plants, standing water black as the boar’s eye. He walked on.

An hour passed before anything happened. He was drawing near to the beach, and the waves roared louder as the ground grew sandier and less earthy. Dunes bulged up, ruining the level lay of the land, but the trees near them choked on vines hung too thick to pass that way. He could only look at them from far off, their sandy slopes strew with green and gold dollarweed, red and yellow sand verbena. The path veered off the other way.

Hardly had he felt the first tinge of regret at that when the sound of laughter filled his ears. A high sound, raucous and maniacal, but filled with something else. A sharp desire, maybe. For what?

When he saw the one who laughed, Ben had to grin. It was the first sign of life he’d seen in this place so far, and so singular the man was, so distinct. He looked out of place here in the wild and scrubby island: a tailored blue-grey blazer, black slacks, a white Oxford. His bowtie was black, and the gold pocket square matched his high-fade pompadour.

The young man stopped, seeing Ben. He stared, cleaned off his horn-rims, and laughed again as if Ben were the world’s funniest joke.

But the laughing man was already half gone. “Hey!” he yelled after, but the other tramped on, away from the path, deep into the woods toward the dunes.

Ben didn’t want to follow. In a way, he was glad to be rid of the man. He only wished he’d asked for something to eat. His stomach rumbled.

* * *

There was still the matter of what to do, though. Where to go now. He’d lost the boar’s trail, and what if not that had he come through the oak for? In this strange place anything seemed possible; anything and nothing.

Without Lari’s laughter the forest was quiet again. Vines dripped from oak limbs and choked palmetto necks, the dried up remnants jessamine and wisteria. Fans of sabal burst here and there from the ground, little languid suns, though void of sunlight on their leaves. The air hung thick and hot. Was the whole forest asleep? Was he?

No, not asleep. He rubbed the loose skin where his arm and elbow had been scraped by landing in the marsh mud. It still stung, though there was no blood on it he could see.

Well. Nothing to do but just go on.

If not the boar, Ben hoped at least to find the beach. In that, too, he was disappointed. The path veered sharply from the waves again. He could almost see their sparkle through the thick, impenetrable brush as he left them behind.

He could smell marsh again some time later. Its feculent smell comforted him. Surely something would be stirring there, if not in this still and close place. If only he could make his way out of here toward the tidal creeks…

Nearly there. The path turned and curved more, but it went steadily on that way overall. Ben felt a breeze on his cheek, the first he’d felt since coming out of the fallen tree.

“Psst!” a voice hissed in his ear. Ben jumped. His neck craned, but he saw no form or figure.

“Psst!” Again the sound came. This time a hand waved to him from out of the brake.

“What’s that?” Ben wanted to ask, but swallowed the words. He wondered, but drew closer to the voice. It was a subtle voice, yet honest somehow. Or so he hoped.

Two sabal fans parted, and now he could see the figure better. An old man in a plaid suit of purple and blue, the sleeves below of ivory. His skin loose and earth-brown, his eyes moist and squinted and veined. The man sat cross-legged. Ben did the same.

“This place you in,” the man gestured above their heads, and Ben spotted an odd thing. One hand, his right, was shrunken, the fingers stiff and stubby. “It’s an odd place. An old place.”

Ben nodded. You didn’t need to tell him that.

The man raised both hands how, and the left was holding a stringed instrument by its neck. The bow as well.

“Place like this,” his voice was hoarse, almost a whisper, “you gotta fix on what it is you want, then follow it without lettin’ go.”

Ben nodded again. He didn’t understand, but agreeing felt like the right thing to do at a point like this.

“You know what it is you want?”

What did he want? To go home? No. To find the boar? The beach? Why had he come here?

For adventure. But he didn’t say that. It felt like the wrong answer to give. He nodded a third time.

He stood. Dusted his hands off, holding the fiddle and bow in his arm’s crook. Ben rose as well and stared back down the path. The man urged him on. “Remember that,” he said again.

Ben tried to seem grateful, but only felt confused. He smiled. The man waved with the shrunken hand again and slipped back sideways into the brush.

He wandered on. Followed the trail. There was nothing to listen for, no movement to watch for, so he started noting details of the trees and shrubs around them. How they all had waxy coats on their leaves, how they grew so close and locked their branches together.

He was grateful for the shade. The sun beat hard on the island, and he felt the heat in the salt-heavy air, but not directly. Again he wished for food.

The path rounded a bend, skirted a flooded hollow on the forest floor. Ben stopped. An odd sight awaited him. On every tree bordering the water, blue bottles had been placed over the ends of branches. It was an eerie, otherworldly sight.

He wondered who had put them there. And why. Some of his neighbors at home had such things in their yards, put up as protection. He thought so, anyway. He wasn’t sure against what. But never this many… It made him feel both safer and more exposed, more vulnerable to danger lurking near at hand, invisible. He glanced side to side. A place like this should have an orb weaver’s web, if not the orb weaver itself, just to give the full effect. But no, not even that.

Ben strolled around the trees. Flicked one of the bottles with his finger. Its dreamy, distant ring was maybe the first nonhuman sound he’d heard on this island.

In the black water below, bits of duckweed and fallen yellow oak leaves floated, but drifted on no current or breeze. Staring into it like this made him feel sleepy.

He sat back against a smooth palmetto trunk. Closed his eyes. He wouldn’t linger long, but he was tired. Five minutes’ rest couldn’t hurt…

* * *

It was the most surprising thing that had happened since he’d got there. It woke him with its sound, then its sheer force. To call it wind would be underselling by a hundredfold. So strong did it howl in that wild that oaks and palmettos and yaupons bent before it. It was gone nearly before Ben could even try to think what to do.

Had he dreamt it? The forest was silent again and still. More than it had been before, if that were possible. The island seemed aware of him now. Holding its breath to see what he would do.

“This,” a reedy voice stated, “is not the path for you.”

Ben spun around, nearly barreled into the source of the words. The figure looking down its pointed nose at him stood out clean and crisp and bold against the shadows of leaves and trees.

“How,” the man asked, “did you find this place at all?”

He thought about that. He couldn’t look away from the man, who traced with long fingers the pressed fold of his blazer, an unstriped seersucker of the same white he wore head to toe.

Ben struggled for words. He couldn’t explain anything that had happened since throwing stones at the hapless oak.

“A red door opened,” he stammered.

The man tilted his head. He leaned down to peer at Ben, the line of his spine strangely graceful. “The door opened,” he repeated. “But for you? Or for another?”

The boar tracks. He swallowed, remembering them. “Both.”

It wasn’t the answer the man wanted. “Brazen boy! So you tailgated in, did you?”

“Are — are you going to make me go home?”

“Make?” The man started. His head turned sharply, as if he were listening for something. He faced Ben again. “Make? I can’t make you do anything. You’re in this mess now. It’s up to you to get out. Or don’t,” he added as an afterthought.

Ben shuffled his feet on the leaf-littered earth. It was a sullen motion, but he didn’t care. He didn’t know adults could be like this. Furtive, uncanny, so quick to interfere yet giving no help. Usually they did one or the other.

He resented asking, but didn’t know what else to do. “Have you seen a boar around? Maybe with blood on it?”

“I have not,” said the man imperiously. “But you had better turn around while you still can. You won’t find anything good here; no food, no drink worth drinking. This path is not your path.”

But it was the only path Ben had found so far. What else could he do but go on? He waved to the man, who ignored him, and pressed on.

* * *

The forest had changed while Ben had slept. He could see that now. The trees still stood, or all those he could see anyway, but the brush and vines and dwarf palmettos had been flattened by the gust that had woken him, tearing over the island.

He’d slept too long. He didn’t know what, but something told him it was true. It felt like hours since he’d laid his head against the palm… But then, the day seemed just as bright as before.

He scanned the canopy for the sun, but found no hint of it. The light was strange, as if it didn’t scatter quite right. As if the sunlight shone from all directions at once.

A dream was coming back to him now, from the depths of his sleep. He thought he’d seen a great throng of people far off, away from the path, gathered in a circle, dancing or singing around a fire or something. It wasn’t night, which was even stranger. He couldn’t see their faces or make out what kind of clothing they wore.

But there were few people on this island, and he’d never seen any who wasn’t alone.

Ben looked back. He couldn’t see the man in white anymore. The path was bending toward the marsh side again, but he could tell it wouldn’t do so for long. He was nearing the far side of the island, where tides came in and mingled with the creeks and the river. Soon he’d be hearing waves again, whichever way the path veered.

Still no hint of boar tracks. He was scanning the ground for them when he heard a low groan.

“Ohhhh, who’s that? Oh, can’t you leave a soul to her rest?”

Ben stared. An old lady rocked in a frail wicker chair, just where a patch of sun lit on her through a break in the trees. Behind her, the marsh gleamed not far off.

“Oh!” she opened her eyes and saw Ben. “Oh, it’s just a poor, precious child! What’s your name, child?”

No word left his lips. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t tell what. He stepped closer.

“Come here, child. Come nearer. Come closer.”

Her skin was dark, sunbaked, leathery. She smiled a toothy smile, reached out her hand.

“Come, child. Come here, come closer to me.”

The dusky green of her dress billowed loose in the sunlight as she leaned forth. “Come, chile. This way. No, closer. Closer, chile. Come closer.”

Ben stopped at the edge of the glade. He felt the sun’s heat reach for him even hear, still in the shade. The woman’s lips pursed. Her frown echoed the sharp angle of her jawline.

A tear fell from her eye. A single salty drop.

Something in that tear terrified him. He turned, tore away through the wood as fast as he could make his legs go. Not fast enough.

He ran till the breath in his lungs failed. He’d been running blind; luckily, he was still on the path. And then he saw it. Not just the trail, but the boar tracks again. Red and matted with sticky fur. He was close now.

* * *

Ben heard waves breaking. He stood at the forest’s edge, at last. The sea shimmered its silvery scales at him, spun hues of blue and green and sunset pink at him, though no sun could be seen still, setting or otherwise. Its foam was cast of pearl. The sand all around of pale gold.

Still the boar tracks ran on. What was he waiting for? The animal was hurt, surely no danger to him. Nor could it have gone much farther.

What was he waiting for?

That dull, hollow feeling had filled him again. He recognized it from hours before, when he’d waited at the edge of his yard, listless and surly. He’d thought he was leaving all of that behind, following the boar. Following adventure. But it was only waiting for him here the whole time.

Nowhere to run away to now. Not even an oak nor marsh stones to throw.

The sand was soft underfoot. It yielded to his steps, a balm to his heart. It was hard to go on. But he went.

The boar tracks ran out, but blood drops still led away across the sand. He followed.

Then stopped. There she was, standing at the edge of the beach, the waves caressing her bare feet. But she wasn’t a boar anymore.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Ben Brooke,” his Aunt Delia said. “For a long, long time.”

He couldn’t speak. What had he expected to find here? Not this. Hot beads dripped from his eyes. He knew he had to say something. But there were no words.

He finally stammered, “What…what’s wrong with….”

It was a stupid thing to say, and he didn’t know what he meant by it anyway. With what? With her? Or him? Or with life itself?

Aunt Dell smiled. “Oh, Ben, nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong in all the world.”

He didn’t know how to answer. Her words above all seemed so plainly wrong; yet she seemed to really believe them. Ben sniffed. She touched his shoulder, her hand more solid now than it had felt in all the weeks of her long disease.

“What’s going to happen now?” he asked.

“Now I take you home.”

“And then?”

“Then you will do what you have to do.”

He peered up at her as they walked along the shore together. “Does that mean…say goodbye to you?”

Now it was Dell who shed a tear. “No, Ben,” she smiled. “It’s too late for that.”

Waves lapped at his feet, colder than he’d have guessed, as hot as the day was. A whelk caught his eye in the wet sand, whole and unbroken. He would have picked it up any other day.

“Then what do I have to do?”

She stopped again. Knelt before him, studied his amber eyes. “If I told you here,” she said, “you’d never stop crying. If I told you now, you’d never stop smiling.”

He waited for more from her, but that was all that came. A long time passed; somehow, not long enough.

Then she stood. Ben followed as she led him into the ocean. Ankle deep, then knee deep. He sucked in a breath when it came up to his crotch, but didn’t let her see his shudder.

He was up to his shoulders now. She turned, held his arm as he paddled with the other to stay afloat, tasting the salt sea. She pushed his head underneath. His eyes stung.

* * *

His head broke water. He sputtered, coughed, and rubbed his eyes. Dog-paddled to shore. Aunt Dell was gone, but so was the empty, trackless beach. He saw houses, little hotels, a pier stretched out over the water. Families sunbathed on towels. He was home.

Or near enough. He knew where he was now, at least, and that was more than he could say of the day behind him. People stared as he reached shore alone, drenched in his normal clothes. Let them. They didn’t seem real. More like people from a dream.

Gulls cried overhead. A crab skittered by his foot. Above his head, the sun was almost setting.

]]>https://mluce.ro/stories/seaisland/feed/0332Sorrow and Light: Reflections on Rewatching Losthttps://mluce.ro/articles/lost/
https://mluce.ro/articles/lost/#respondSun, 02 Aug 2015 00:53:37 +0000http://mluce.ro/?p=334Characters, not mythology. Mystery, not answers. Five years after Lost’s polarizing finale, I look into the eye of the Island again. How I felt then, why I drifted away from the show, and what I saw when I came back to rewatch it — all six seasons — for the first time since "The End."]]>I open my eye.

I lay on the beach, deaf to the clang and clamor around me, confusion and chaos. I don’t know where I am or how I got here. My foot. My toe is — how?— moving. My lips part, but there’d nothing to say. No words for what couldn’t have happened, but just has.

Who here could I tell? And how could I ever make them understand?

* * *

I’ve just finished my rewatch of Lost, the entire series, and this scene still blazes in my mind. It’s powerful, revelatory. There are few, if any, moments like it in television history, and that probably hasn’t changed much, if at all. Yes, there are still moments in Lost that I have trouble with, or feel a complicated mixture of bitter and sweet about. But this one will always stand bright and clear in my memory.

John Locke has always been my favorite character. Perhaps in any television show, ever. I can feel his sense of wonder, his joy in the face of the miraculous. I’ve felt that before. I can feel, too, how he must have felt about the Island. I know what it is to love a place, to be attached to it fiercely, in a way that many of those around me are not.

It was in the middle of the move to my current home, the Lowcountry of South Carolina, that I saw the premiere episode of Lost on television. In a way, the show represents to me a particular time in my life. I’d just lost a job, and had moved here from four states away, to a city I had never set foot in before. I had nothing I could count on here. No living to be made, no friends, nothing I could hold onto. It’s probably an exaggeration to say I was upended as much as the survivors of Flight 815 were, but not a terribly huge one. I was forced to figure out how to live in a new place with people I didn’t know at all. And, as with Locke, I grew to love this place more than anywhere else I’d ever known.

I don’t want to put too much weight on that point. Obviously, moving from one city to another is not the same as losing civilization altogether — having literally no idea where in the world you are. But the story of Lost had applicability. It’s something I could, and can, relate to.

I watched the two-hour pilot in the family room of my cousins-in-law (most of whom I had only met once before) during one of the first nights I spent in South Carolina. I had been drawn to the show by Dominic Monaghan (Charlie), who I knew from the Lord of the Rings films. As I watched the story unfold, though, that quickly became one of the lesser pulls that Lost had on me.

Six years later, I was well-settled in my new home, and well-settled in the story of the Island. When the series finale aired, I cried a little. It had been an amazing journey, one I suspected then (correctly, it turns out) I was unlikely to take ever again.

Until this summer, though, I never went back to that well. I never bothered watching Lost straight through, from beginning to end. Why not? I’d watched each of the first five seasons multiple times over. Why would I stop there?

* * *

As are most things relating to Lost, it’s complicated. I said I was satisfied with the ending, right? Yeah, it’s true. I’m aware of the controversy over it, but I never really had any part in that.

To me, there are two major aspects of the show: mysteries and characters. I never watched Lost to get answers to its questions. I understood, and loved, what the show was always about from the very beginning: the mystery itself, not the solution.

Obviously the show had to give some answers, and it definitely did. As for the questions left open? Well, I never felt like I needed detailed, delineated answers anyway. It’s fun to fill in the gaps with your own interpretations, or just bask in the strangeness and eeriness of the whole thing. At the end of the pilot, Charlie asks, “Guys…where are we?” To me, that question was more thrilling than any conceivable way they could answer it.

What I needed from Lost is a bit harder to pin down. Let’s call it a framework of understanding: one that makes sense to me, something I can hold in my mind and say, “That makes sense. That’s how this could have happened, even if we don’t know for sure.”

More important than the mysteries were the character arcs, and that’s something that Lost delivered in spades, especially in its series finale. One could say “The End” focused almost entirely on character resolutions, having already answered the most important questions, or at very least, having given us a framework in which to understand them. And I loved it. That ending is probably as close to flawless as we had a right to expect.

To me, this is where it gets tricky, though. It wasn’t for any unanswered question that I eventually soured on Lost. It was precisely the character arcs where I began to feel, looking back, that the show had lost itself. One particular arc, to be exact — that of John Locke.

The Problem of John Locke.

I don’t feel this way anymore. John Locke and his story are not problems in my book. To explain why I wrote off the show as a loss, though — as well as what drew me back in — I have to get into the issues I had with his character arc in the wake of the final season. Again, Locke is probably my favorite character in any television show. What they did to him, to retcon his story in a single revelation, always rankled in the back of my mind.

Like me, Locke is a man of faith. He doesn’t have all the answers, and though he wants to know them, he doesn’t have to. He’s content, for the time being, in proceeding with trust in the Island, believing that everything has happened for a reason, and that destiny — sooner or later — will be fulfilled.

That’s the story I fell in love with. That’s where I related so much to Locke.

But then, there was “No Place Like Home.” We watched, in the final moments of season 4, as the camera panned over to reveal the occupant of the coffin in the flash-forward: John Locke. He was dead, and he was off the Island. I remember the heartbreak and bafflement I felt when I saw that scene for the first time.

I recovered quickly. Sad, right? But not devastating in a permanent way. Characters die all the time in stories, and sometimes their final acts and moments are so meaningful and moving that they entirely redeem the fact of their death. Sometimes a character dying is such a great moment that you wouldn’t want it to be any other way. We didn’t know yet how Locke died, or why. For all we knew, it would surely be just this sort of noble end when it finally came.

Then we got “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” in which Locke is talked out of despair and suicide only to be murdered by Ben. Definitely not what I’d expected — a sad and pitiful moment. But even that wasn’t enough to make me lose hope.

In the previous episode, after all (“316”), we saw that Locke was alive, in the present day, on the Island again. And the episodes leading up to this had dropped repeated hints that his death would not last long. The phrase “dead is dead” had yet to be spoken, and the story had been playing so much with Christian imagery and rhetoric that it seemed Locke was destined to become a type and figure of Christ — resurrected as soon as he was brought back to the Island, where he belonged.

Of course, this is exactly what we were meant to think, until “The Incident” aired. It hit me hard, not just once, but twice. It wasn’t enough that this man was not Locke but the smoke monster, a figure who would become the show’s central antagonist. No, the gut punches continued as we learned this had been the monster’s plan the whole time. Locke’s journey was not that of a man of faith following the call of destiny, but that of a sad, pitiful sap who was used. Conned, manipulated, and gullible enough to take the bait. An easy mark.

Hook, line, sinker.

That devastated me. And it wasn’t till long after “The End” aired that I began to realize how much I disliked it.

* * *

The Problem of Destiny.

A similar source of disappointment to me was the way the show resolved one of its central themes, the idea of Destiny.

I don’t mean destiny, by the way. I mean Destiny. The capital is important.

The motif of Destiny and miracles has been part of Lost‘s DNA from the moment we saw Locke wake on the beach and wiggle his previously paralyzed toe. It popped up continually as the show went on, voiced most notably in one of the final scenes of “Exodus.” In that scene, a very skeptical Jack calls Locke out on his erratic behavior. Locke’s response is intriguing. It forecasts his character arc and clearly outlines his motivations:

Do you really think all this is an accident? That we, a group of strangers, survived — many of us with just superficial injuries? Do you think we crashed on this place by coincidence? Especially this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason. . . . The Island brought us here. This is no ordinary place, you’ve seen that, I know you have. But the Island chose you, too, Jack. It’s destiny.

Regardless of how our man of faith’s personal story turned out, this theme had been a part of Lost from the beginning. Nor do we only hear such ideas from Locke. Ben and Richard speak of the Island’s will, and its miraculous healing properties speak for themselves. Even Desmond, a man who wants nothing more than to leave the Island for good, even phrases his time there (albeit ironically) as “saving the world.”

Yet in the end, the story we got in season 6 seemed little more than the final moves in a longstanding personal grudge game. Sure, Jacob wears white and his nameless brother wears black, but there seemed little of dark vs. light (a common motif in Lost, which also built toward the Destiny theme) in their conflict. Interesting though their story was — and it was extremely interesting, don’t get me wrong — it did not feel at the time to be any sort of culmination of the central theme of Destiny.

We were sold, “Let’s save the world from evil and danger, and fulfill our purpose”; what we got instead was “Let’s take sides in a philosophical family squabble.”

* * *

Like I said, I don’t feel that way anymore. Five years have passed since the show’s ending, and that time has cleared away most of my feelings about the whole thing, and allowed me to return with a fresh perspective — even while knowing what will happen, being able to hold the entire plot arc in my mind to consider as a finished work.

More importantly, thanks to the podcast Riddles in the Dark (the work of the Mythgard Institute‘s Corey Olsen), I’ve developed quite a different critical approach to thinking about stories than the one I had when I first watched Lost. Without these ideas, I doubt I would have been able to like Lost again as much as I do now, even less be able to keep an open mind as I rewatched it. I think it’s important to touch on a couple of them before going any further.

To remember, and to let go.

Mention Lost in conversation, and you’re likely to hear a variation of one complaint: They had no idea what they were doing. They were just making it up as they went along.

That suspicion was heard at countless proverbial watercoolers with each new episode, as if the mantra of some cynical cult. Those who didn’t watch the show in its heyday have no idea how much vitriol lies within these seemingly innocent words.

But there are two assumptions also hidden in them that I think are responsible for a large degree for the disappointment that colors people’s memory of Lost. Beliefs determine feelings, and how we respond to a work of art sometimes says more about us than it does about the art itself. And what these assumptions say is painfully ironic:

We missed the point (or one of them) entirely.

The first assumption is that good writers should, or often do, plan out every (or nearly every) part of a story before they start telling it, so that every plot twist is hinted at or is consistent with everything that’s happened before.

I think it’s pretty apparent anyway, but a few writers and showrunners have spoken out about how this was absolutely not the case with Lost. Their accounts are pretty consistent: the writers knew the large, broad strokes of the story and the underlying concepts (e.g., the Island as a special place where good and evil are in constant struggle). They knew a lot of the key moments that would happen along the way, though not all of them. Often they had to figure out, before writing each season, exactly how to get to those key moments, and in that sense, a lot of it was “made up as they went along.” But it doesn’t mean there was no plan.

(It’s also worth pointing out that the writers had a limited degree of creative control. As one of its most popular shows at the time, ABC wasn’t about to give them free rein to take the story wherever they wanted it to go. The finagling and deception that went into getting away with what they did do are well-documented as well.)

I’m not sure this is a legitimate complaint, though — about any story, but especially not serial television like Lost. Of course they were making it up as they went along. I think very few writers know exactly how their work will end when they first start, and if they do, they often don’t know exactly how it will get there. (As a writer myself, I’m painfully aware of this.) And serial storytelling has been around for centuries. Dickens and Dostoevsky, notably, released their greatest works chapter by chapter, week by week or month by month, in the newspapers and magazines of the time.

In that day, as with television now, there was no way to edit work already released and enjoyed by the public in order to accommodate new ideas of where a character or plotline should go. If they wanted to shift directions midstream, they had to find a way of making their new ideas fit with what they’d already told. This may not seem an ideal way of doing things, but the endurance of A Tale of Two Cities and The Brothers Karamazov — both works featured in Lost — would suggest it’s worth doing. Wendell Berry writes,

…it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

“Marriage, Too, May Have Something to Teach Us”

You can argue that Lost did this with much lesser skill than the serial writers of past ages, and this is probably true. You might point to the current Golden Age of television, in which writing is often better and tighter, with endings are generally (not always) well-crafted, and declare that Lost doesn’t meet this newer, higher standard, and that might be true as well. However, the mere observation that they were making it up as they went along is not a valid criticism. It’s not even a criticism at all.

In fact, one might say it’s a criterion for inclusion among the truly great. So many writers I respect talk about how, even when they map a story out beforehand, it often takes on a separate will, refusing to go any way but its own. They write of how they become mere vessels of the story, or are witnessing it take shape. The master plan is subsumed by the happy accident; the story one stumbles into is greater than the story one had planned. Haruki Murakami. Paul Auster. Ernest Hemingway. Mark Twain. Stephen King. Gabriel García Márquez. Isabel Allende. Neil Gaiman. J.R.R. Tolkien. All have witnessed their work surpass their own intentions.

The second assumption is a bit trickier, since it stems from something I’m hesitant to condemn: theorizing and speculation. This approach to television is one that has only become more popular since Lost, which is arguably one of the first shows to provoke it. The writers certainly encouraged it with their alternate reality games, oblique references to philosophy, literature, and mythology, and a knowingly playful podcast. I’d be lying if I said I don’t find it fun myself, or that I didn’t engage in my own share of rampant speculation and theorizing.

Looking back, the years when Lost was on the air were a pivotal moment in Internet history. Before then, pop culture had been analyzed, scrutinized, and enjoyed in online forums, but it had mostly been a haven for nerds (a label I proudly claim), the most dedicated fans. I won’t go as far as to say that Lost was what sparked the change, but that moment in history saw the mass popularization of the Internet as a forum for television appreciation. In that regard, Lost was pure fire, and the show rewarded its following by planting more and more clues that weren’t always as significant as they seemed.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy this approach to television a lot, and I think it’s mentally and creatively stimulating. But I also take any theorizing with a grain or two of salt — with a side of self-awareness. If we’re not careful, and sometimes even if we are, it’s easy to fall into a mode of thinking where we stop enjoying a story, stop engaging with it, and start to feel cynical, and, inevitably, disappointed.

The problem isn’t with theorizing or speculating itself. The problem is when our focus shifts from the actual story we are watching unfold, to what we want the story to be, and what we think or expect it should be. When it inevitably fails to meet those expectations, it’s very hard to see a story — much less enjoy it — for what it is.

I had set this very trap for myself, and fell into it, hard.

C.S. Lewis, a writer and scholar of the mid-twentieth century (whose ideas were referenced in Lost in the character of Charlotte), wrote on a similar subject in his short book An Experiment in Criticism:

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

There may seem little connection between these two assumptions — that writers should have their stories well planned-out, and that one’s expectations of a story are at all a metric for its quality — but not only is there one, it also runs to the heart of one of Lost‘s major themes. And thus, the bitter irony. In both assumptions, the point is all about control. A certain regard for activity, for striving, for our attempts to delve into mystery and bring answers into the light of day. It’s understandable why we do this. It’s fundamentally human. It’s the same reason why meditation and mindfulness are so difficult for so many people. We are Jack, who even when he tries to face his destiny in season 5, still insists on doing it his way, by detonating a bomb. We have trouble getting out of our own way — getting ourselves out of the way.

Lastly, it’s important to remember the freedom we have, as viewers, to analyze and interpret a work once the finished product has been put before us. Too often we have the tendency, when a creator has commented on their work as much as the writers of Lost have, to take what they say about it as gospel. As solid, unavoidable, canonical fact.

This need not be the case. Again, C.S. Lewis:

It is the author who intends; the book means. . . . Of a book’s meaning, in this sense, its author is not necessarily the best, and is never a perfect, judge.

“On Criticism”

This is a similar, though inverse, idea as my point about control. Whether it’s our own attempts to control how we experience a story, or our attempts to subject ourselves to the writers’ control, both approaches severely limit our enjoyment of a work. However close to the well a creator’s ideas come from, these thoughts about their work and its meaning are entirely separate from the art itself. Art stands alone — apart from us, and apart from the artist.

Many use a work of art; few receive it.

This perspective leaves us free to engage with Lost for what it is, rather than what it was meant to be. Whether the writers’ intentions succeeded or failed, it is with Lost that we have to grapple — not with the planned plotline for Lost.

* * *

To me, these perspectives aren’t just illuminating; they’re vital. Without them, I’d be stuck interpreting Locke’s story in the context of the writers’ apparent intentions, and my own disappointments. With them, I can look at what happens on the screen and draw my own conclusions from the events I observe, and only from those events. If evidence for an idea exists, even if it was unintentional, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there.

With that in mind, I want to look at the two aspects of Lost‘s ending that I had the most trouble with: Locke’s storyline, and the treatment of the theme of Destiny.

The eye of the Island.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Locke is the show’s saddest character. His life before the Island is scarred by abandonment, betrayal. Loneliness and futility. His death in season 5 is tragic, perhaps ignoble from certain points of view: an abortive suicide turned murder. In his final moments he does not give up on life, but chooses to carry on his work. And that counts for something — but it’s really the most dignified thing you can say about that scene.

In season 3’s “Further Instructions,” we’re told that Locke is “amenable to coercion.” This phrase suggests he is particularly gullible, that it is possibly his greatest weakness. Coercion, often in the form of cons, is a motif in Lost from the very first season, so it’s tempting to conclude that Locke is ultimately wrong to believe. His faith is a liability, not an asset. He was not chosen, or special, but the victim of a long con by the Man in Black, who saw in him a vessel for the loophole he’d been planning for centuries.

But this is a shallow reading of the show, at best. And there is evidence against it. For one, it’s not true that the Man in Black was behind everything that inspired Locke’s faith. He is healed (as is Rose) by the Island’s own virtue.

Nor is the Man in Black the only figure to guide Locke’s journey. Like the other Candidates, he is brought to the Island by Jacob, who touches him, and therefore chooses him.

There is also a moment, early in the show, that is baffling yet suggestive. In “Walkabout,” Locke seems to survive a run-in with the smoke monster, a scene we see from the monster’s own point of view as it peers down at him from the foliage.

Is this the monster, though? Everything in this episode supports that conclusion. But attention to the story as a whole, to what it tells us and shows us, begins to allow ideas perhaps unintended by the writers.

The first time Locke describes this experience aloud, he says, “I looked into the eye of the Island, and what I saw…was beautiful.”

This hardly fits the image of the monster we eventually see in “Exodus” — a column of roiling, rage-filled black smoke — and indeed, Locke’s look of joy-turned-fear in that scene suggests that it isn’t what he had expected, either. When Locke again mentions his original encounter to Eko, he calls it,

…a very bright light. It was beautiful.

“The Cost of Living”

“That is not what I saw,” Mr. Eko spits back in reply.

We see the monster at many points in Lost, and it never takes the form of a bright light. Nor does it take any form (aside from the dead) besides black smoke. It isn’t as if he sees it differently from everyone else, either: in “Man of Science, Man of Faith,” referring to that same scene in “Exodus” when the monster tries to pull him into a hole, he, too, describes it as black smoke.

So what does Locke see in “Walkabout”? I think it’s clear that the writers intended it to be the monster. But again, we have to deal with what’s actually in the story, not with what its creators intended.

What’s actually in the story suggests an encounter with something other than the monster. Perhaps Jacob? We never see him in any form other than his own, and there’s no reason to believe he can change his shape, especially since his brother’s ability to do so stems from his death in the Island’s heart. What, then?

A manifestation of the Island, maybe? Of its power? Bright light is intimately associated with the Island, both in the outpouring of energy we see at the Swan and the Orchid, as well as in the Heart of the Island in the final episodes.

Soon after this exchange, the monster kills Mr. Eko. And yet, in “Further Instructions,” Locke’s vision tells him to save Eko. Locke understands this as instructions from the Island itself. Wherever these instructions do come from, they seem directly opposed to the monster’s goals, to judge and kill.

* * *

There are other glimpses, too, of a will at work besides the monster’s. I say “a will” because it’s not always clear whose. The most obvious answer is Jacob’s, but the show hints strongly at times that the Island has its own plan. It’s hard to tell where Jacob’s work ends and the Island’s begin; assuming they’re distinct at all.

We know Jacob chooses the people who come to the Island, and brings them there, but he does not simply sit back and let things take their course, as it might appear. He works indirectly through Richard, and, I would argue, through subtler ways as well (though again, some of these may be the Island).

A few examples:

At the end of “The Incident,” the monster seems displeased by Jacob’s whispered claim that “they” (i.e., the people stuck in 1977) are coming back to the present. This would suggest that having them around for its final work of destroying and leaving the Island is not a part of its plan. Is it part of Jacob’s? Or is it the Island’s doing, the logically necessary endpoint of the time loop caused when it was moved?

One might argue that the Man in Black does want them back so he can kill the rest of Jacob’s Candidates. But Walt’s absence from the Island seems to disqualify him from preventing the monster’s departure, so it seems more probable that he’d rather them stay away.

In the final scenes of “Cabin Fever,” having found Jacob’s cabin, Locke unknowingly meets the monster in the guise of Christian Shepherd, who bids him ask the one question that really matters. From a season 6 vantage point, it seems clear he is trying to trap or manipulate Locke. And knowing Locke, the monster might well expect to be asked what his destiny is. To it, Locke’s purpose is to die, giving it access to his form, and influence over those who can kill Jacob. With this in mind, had Locke acted predictably here, there’s a good chance he would have been killed on the spot. But Locke doesn’t ask this. Instead, he asks how to save the Island.

And this is where the scene gets really interesting. Note the expression on Christian’s face: he looks surprised, almost disappointed. Yet he answers, and his answer works — it ends up saving the Island, precisely the opposite of the monster’s endgame. Is it possible he answers because he has no choice in the matter? The ash around the cabin, the system the Others have to summon it, as well as its own plea of “Help me,” all stand as evidence that the monster is, or can be, constrained in certain ways. Is it possible that Locke’s selflessness here saved lives, including (for the moment) his own?

This moment speaks to the agency not of Jacob, nor the Island, but of Locke himself, and in that sense, though a short and quick scene, it stands as perhaps the strongest evidence against the view that the monster was always in control and Locke always its pawn.

Sure, there’s a good bit of interpretation in all of this; but neither is it all purely subjective. Whatever may have been intended by these scenes, my reading of them rests on evidence that is present in the show itself, so it deserves consideration.

The show, after all, doesn’t tell us how to understand these scenes. (Nor should it.) Agree with me or not, some level of interpretation is needed to make sense of these events.

* * *

In the end, Locke’s story is a complex one — perhaps the most complex story shown on television in quite a while. Its subtlety isn’t in moral ambiguity or shades of good and evil, but in its structure: in the fact that we are left uncertain how to feel about his life and death till very late in the show, long after he as a character leaves the stage for good.

Unlike Charlie’s death, a turning point that is its own emotional peak, the payoff of Locke’s story is a slow burn, eluding clarity, always twisting, turning, wavering till the final moments of the show.

His end may not be sacrificial, but it does accomplish something. It spurs Jack forward on his journey toward faith, convincing him to return to the Island and face their calling there. No, Locke’s sacrifice comes much earlier, when he chooses to leave the Island and save his people, knowing that he may well be leaving it for good, and that leaving will mean his death.

It’s a choice he makes with the full knowledge of its cost, and the nobility of that cannot be lessened by how others exploit his faith.

‘…From which its beauty chiefly came.’

Locke’s story is a sad story, but that may be the very source of its power. There’s a reason we tell sad stories, why tragedy, as a genre, endures through human history.

Sorrow is unique because it is so painfully, immediately real, but universal as well. It connects us all to each other whether we realize it or not. And pain expressed — catharsis — is one of the healthiest, strongest, most transcendent feelings we can have. It is, paradoxically, a wellspring of hope.

Sorrow frees us, when we meet it at the safe distance of fiction. In its wake we are vulnerable, and at peace with our vulnerability. We are loosed from the fetters of mean circumstance that so often choke our lives. And in our suffering, we find meaning. In meaning, comfort.

Locke himself — the real Locke — seems to hold this view after his death, when we again meet him in the flash-sideways. He is wiser, more contented, less scarred by being left behind.

In “The Last Recruit,” the Man in Black contends that Locke was not a man of faith, but a sucker. Is he, though? Sure, he falls victim to the monster’s plan, providing its long-desired loophole. But this view misses everything that is rich and profound in the fabric of Lost.

What is gullibility? In what meaningful way do we distinguish it from the virtue we call trust? If trust is a virtue, isn’t it a virtue regardless of what others may choose to do with this trust? If Locke trusts openly, isn’t he freely exercising virtue, to an extent most of us would find unthinkable?

Locke is ultimately vindicated, after all — both by Lost as a story, and by Jack, his ideological opposite. In the series finale, Jack calls out the Man in Black for presuming to act and talk like Locke: “You disrespect his memory by wearing his face, but you’re nothing like him. Turns out he was right about almost everything. I just wish I could’ve told him that while he was still alive.” Even Ben, Locke’s own killer, reasserts his status as a man of faith, and “a better man than I’ll ever be.”

I contend it doesn’t matter whether the monster uses Locke, or whether he is conned. It’s never the unknown circumstances of our choices that define who we are, or the meaning our stories have; it’s the choices themselves, and our knowledge and frame of mind when we make them.

Locke chooses the Island, and does so continually as the story unfolds — because it has chosen him, apart from any designs the monster may have for him.

* * *

We put a lot of stock in the idea of the very first time. We crave the freshness of the new, the unique thrill of discovery. And those things are great — but they’re also incomplete.

You can’t really understand, or even appreciate, a good story if you’ve only read, or watched, or in some way experienced it, only once. As much as it captivates and enchants, the first time only delves a layer or two deep. We have no idea how a story will end, how characters will develop. The not-knowing, the anticipation, are exactly what make this so exciting. The incompleteness is just what we love — but the knowing, too, is a key to a different kind of pleasure, in many ways a richer one, that those who don’t re-read or re-watch will never know.

Once you know a story’s plot, its ending, its character arcs, then the story really opens for you. Seeds planted early on will quicken with life, and hidden things shine with a special glow. Before you had missed them, or missed their significance. Now you see them for what they are. Motifs and themes take on body and dimension, and even structure becomes a thing of beauty.

A story — a good story — is a different beast entirely the second time around.

Hence my worry, when I first started my re-watch of Lost. As deep an experience as the second time can be, it is also a winnow, dividing good stories from the rest. Knowing the whole story, the reasons why Flight 815 was brought to the Island, the part they would play in Jacob’s endgame, would my favorite moments still hold up? Would things I had liked before seem hollow, less meaningful, now that I knew what they really were?

To my relief, the opposite was true. Approaching Lost now on its own terms, and not mine, I found myself enjoying it as much as, and at times more so, than before.

I found myself noticing things I’d missed. About fourteen pages of notes later (only a small fraction of which have made it into this essay), I found that earlier moments in the show were given new significance in retrospect, sometimes dramatically so. One of the clearest places this is seen is in one of the two major plotlines of season 2.

The nonlinear story of the Swan.

The hatch is one of Lost‘s earliest mysteries. Before the statue, before the button, before we even see the monster, there is the hatch. It’s impossible to guess what’s really inside of it, and when we finally find out, the revelation asks more questions than it answers — a typical storytelling technique for Lost.

Among these questions:

Who were the Dharma Initiative?

Why were they gone now?

What was the “incident” that made the button necessary?

Was the button even necessary after all?

What would happen if it wasn’t pushed every 108 minutes?

At times, Locke’s frustration with the hatch mirrors the viewer’s. “This isn’t what was supposed to happen!” Locke tells Jack in “Orientation.” Later, after Jack leaves, he pleads aloud to the Island: “Why is this happening like this? What do you want? What do you — What am I supposed to do?“

As is typical with stories about John Locke, the answer to his question is complex and not easily apparent. Knowing all that was to happen in season 5, it dawned on me, as I re-watched these episodes, that this storyline’s significance is much greater than I’d previously thought. Unsatisfied (so far) with the way the Destiny storyline had resolved in season 6, I began to think of the Swan and its story as that theme’s real culmination.

How appropriate would it be for Lost that its climax would come not near the end of its story, but near the beginning. After all, Lost has always had a nonlinear plot structure, having played with time ever since the pilot episode when the flashback device was first used. Time is further warped in “Through the Looking Glass” when the flash-forward is unveiled, and even more in season 5 when actual time travel occurs. It becomes hopelessly, ultimately raveled when causality loops like Richard’s compass start to pop up.

The biggest causality loop of all is Flight 815’s own arrival on the Island, an event intimately tied up with the Swan Station, whose story begins in season 2. Locke enters the hatch, finds Desmond inside, along with a button that must be pushed every 108 minutes in order to save the world. Desmond leaves, Locke takes over, yet his faith in the Island is tested by the arrival of Ben, and the discovery of the Pearl Station, both of which seem to suggest the button is merely a psychological experiment.

Inside the Pearl, as if to underscore the importance of the Swan in the wider story of Lost, Mr. Eko points out the circuitous path of coincidences that have led both him and his brother, separately, not only to the Island but to the very place where Locke’s disillusion reaches its highest point.

And I took this cross from around Yemi’s neck and put it back on mine, just as it was on the day I first took another man’s life. So let me ask you — how can you say this is meaningless? I believe the work being done in the hatch is more important than anything.

“?”

It’s easier to appreciate this significance now, with the entire plot of Lost in mind, than when the show first aired in the mid-late aughts. Even after season 2’s finale, we only knew part of the story: the hatch is a Fisher King-like wound in the Island’s side, the site of a unstable rupture of energy that is only patched over, not healed; a short-term solution at best. It’s not till seasons 5 and 6 that the rest is filled in. It was not just any wound, but a wound Jack and the other time-stranded survivors had themselves directly caused in 1977, through their hubris and ignorance. When Locke, Eko, Charlie, and Desmond play their roles in sealing off the breach, they are healing a wound that their own people have caused, and thus closing another time loop. Even Locke’s temporary loss of faith is a part of that story. Were it not for him being there, the failsafe key may never have been turned, and the rupture never healed.

As I re-watched this story, I realized how compelling it is. This was a story about Destiny, with that capital D.

In it there is transgression and redemption (perhaps one of the deepest and most mythic story structures), and the preservation of a sacred, mysterious, immensely important place. Perhaps, I thought at that point, Lost fulfills its Destiny theme after all, in the last place anyone would have looked for it — not near the end, but the beginning.

With this in mind, I began to enjoy the show more openly, confidently, happy now that it might be possible to like Lost again after so many years. But as I neared the end of the show, something else began to happen. The final season itself began to take on a new light.

Perhaps due to my disappointment with Locke’s story, I had blinded myself to just how important the struggle between Jacob and his brother really is. I had thought that their story was merely a personal squabble writ large. A petty thing, when all was said and done.

* * *

‘If the light goes out here…’

The Island is a vitally important place.

I might have said a uniquely special place, which would be true as well. It is numinous ground, where light doesn’t scatter right, where cause and effect are entangled. A gravity well for fate, to which castaways of many lands and ages build their monuments and temples. It is a place so special some would do anything to find it, and Others leave their old lives behind to guard it. A place, as Locke tells Jack, “where miracles happen.”

One of the things that makes it special is its role as a chessboard of sorts, a setting where good and evil are in constant struggle.

But it’s a place of power as well. Its energy is enough to override the destructive force of a nuclear explosion — at least long enough to send the time travelers back to the present, unharmed. It’s enough to end the world, should that energy be released uncontrolled.

Somehow, I had lost sight of all that. No matter. Season 6 goes out of its way to remind us, if we keep ourselves open to what the story is doing.

The episodes “Ab Aeterno” and “Across the Sea” give two metaphors for the Island’s central importance in the world. First, it is a cork, keeping a vast amount of darkness and evil out of the world. Second, it is a light, perhaps a source of the light (or at least its physical components) that gives life to the entire world.

The two images work quite well together. Darkness, after all, can only be defined as the absence of light. So light is the only thing that can drive away darkness. When we finally see the Heart of the Island, we see the light is not just figurative, but literal as well.

What is the Island’s Heart? What is it that makes this place so special? In “Across the Sea,” the series’ antepenultimate episode, we are finally told:

Life. Death. Rebirth. It’s the source.

The source of what? Whatever it is,

…a little bit of this very same light is inside of every man. But they always want more.

More of what? What is it that every person has but wants more of?

Life. Because the Island is not just one of many special places in the world, as the season 2 episode “S.O.S.” hints. If the light goes out here, it goes out everywhere. And the fact that the Man in Black needs to destroy the Island in order to leave is a very big deal. It’s hard to imagine higher stakes. If Jack and his people don’t prevent him from leaving, potentially all life on Earth could be destroyed. Both in the abstract and in the particular — in Jacob’s long senet game with his brother — the Island is a place where good and evil are in constant struggle, and Flight 815 is there to tip that balance.

That is the call of Destiny.

Ironically, my dissatisfaction with this season’s arc was not due to any faults in the story itself, but rather in giving too much weight to the Man in Black’s words.

It is he who belittles the Island and its importance, who insists that none of the story meant anything. That none of the survivors ever had any real purpose or destiny there.

I had enjoyed Lost immensely as it had been on the air, especially the finale. How, then, did I ever let his words infect my love of the show?

In any case, a willingness to let the story do its work on me, as well as the knowledge of everything that happens, all the thematic and character payoffs that come, made season 6 even more enjoyable in my re-watch than the first time around.

* * *

Tipping Jacob’s scale.

Is Lost a good show?

For all that I’ve written here, I still haven’t answered that question. However good certain parts of a story are, the story as a whole may or may not reflect that quality. And that was the entire point of re-watching it now, five years later, with fresh eyes, a refocused critical lens, and all of my old expectations (hopefully) cleared away. Not to see if the parts I hadn’t liked were any better; but to see if the show itself, as a whole, was as good as I’d always wanted it to be.

Now that I’ve resolved my issues with Locke’s character arc and the Destiny theme, I want to look at the question in a slightly different form: Does Lost have any flaws?

Of course it does. Like anything made by human hands and minds, it isn’t perfect. Sometimes these flaws are big, like Walt’s absence from the later seasons, or the contradiction between how Michael explains the whispers in season 6 and how they’re presented for the entirety of the show before that point. Much more often they are smaller, niggling points that we forget about after an episode or two. Such things aren’t really worth mentioning.

But I do think there a few problems, at least, that deserve attention. In order of ascending importance:

4. The Cage Episodes

This early season 3 arc, called a “mini-season” by the writers, drew widespread complaint because of its slower movement. I personally feel this owes a lot to watching these episodes week to week; I find binging them a much more interesting experience.

Ultimately, I think these episodes matter. They develop Kate and Sawyer’s resistance to the Others, and build a scenario where Jack can allow himself to save Ben’s life. Their escape, and his agreement to help his enemy, could not have worked but for the storytelling done in this arc.

Yes, the mini-season does lag, even when viewed as a whole. But looking at each episode, I can’t point to any one that feels slow in and of itself, except possibly for “A Tale of Two Cities,” the season 3 opener. Even that episode has an amazing, jaw-dropping first scene (in the grand tradition of Lost season premieres), and an interesting moment where Jack finally lets go of an element of his past. Even when the flashbacks are dull, the Island story fascinates.

3. The Nature of Evil

From the very beginning, philosophy is a motif in Lost. I won’t call it a theme, since very few philosophical ideas are explored in major storylines, if at all.

(Of course, you could argue that the nature of humanity is a major philosophical theme, since the removal of our characters from civilization puts certain ideas to the test in a visceral way; but the treatment of this question is inconsistent, and never takes central stage. It remains on the periphery, just out of conscious sight.)

I don’t consider this a flaw. ​Lost tends to value the personal over the cerebral, which is true of philosophy as well as mystery. And that’s fine. But a show that name-drops Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Burke (for a start) should at least have its most central themes well thought-out, and yet some of them are a bit shaky.

(Interestingly, the most problematic ideas almost never touch the practical or emotional level, but remain on grand, overarching, mythological ground.)

In few places is this clearer than the way evil is conceptualized in later seasons. In the episode “Ab Aeterno,” Jacob presents the metaphor of a cork in a wine bottle to describe the Island’s importance. While interesting both visually and conceptually, as a metaphor for evil, wine is a very weak choice. In this scenario, evil, like wine, is substantial, a thing in and of itself that can be contained.

The problem here is that evil is negative, not positive — in the philosophical sense of these terms, meaning that it has no real being in and of itself, but is derived from a lack of something else. A better metaphor would be darkness or coldness. Neither exist on their own, or have being in and of themselves; they are only the absences of light and heat. Light and heat, like goodness, have a real existence of their own, and can be measured. Dark and cold cannot be measured, nor can evil. Evil is only an absence: the negation, the ruination, of something good.

It’s only when the Heart of the Island is introduced, later in “Across the Sea,” that the conception of the Island and its role become lucid. On its own, the wine imagery falls apart.

(There is one possible interpretation that would save the wine metaphor: that the wine represents not evil in general, as Jacob’s words in “Ab Aeterno” seem to imply, but the smoke monster specifically. The Island is both the thing that needs protection against it, and the thing that protects the rest of the world from it. In this reading, the metaphor works quite well, but it’s not immediately obvious.)

2. Eko’s Story

Slow subplots and flawed philosophy aren’t great, but neither are as bad, or painfully obvious, as a broken character arc. I’m not talking about one I find unsatisfying from a personal perspective, but one that is objectively and jarringly uneven. That, sadly, is the case with another of my favorite characters, Mr. Eko.

There’s something special about Eko from the first time we see him onscreen, in the scene where he appears to be an Other. The more we learn about him, the more interesting he is: his vow of silence for forty days after killing two men, his use of a scripture-carved stick for a weapon, his quiet, thoughtful, intense mannerism.

“The 23rd Psalm,” his first flashback, is still one of my favorite episodes. It adds so much depth to an already intriguing figure. Not only is he a man of faith, like Locke, but a man of violence as well, with death on his hands: a secret burden of guilt that drives who he is. Eko has been shown the worst parts of himself by a tragedy of his own making, and has done his best to repent and be a good man, worthy of his brother. He does good things (feeding Nathan when he’s wrongly suspected, or carrying a dying Sawyer to the only known doctor on the Island) not for the benefits they can earn him, but because they are the right things to do.

So it’s frustrating, and disappointing, to come to “The Cost of Living” in season 3. Eko’s penitence and humility, the forces that drive his character up till now, seem to vanish into thin air in this episode, replaced by an oddly bitter defiance — the monster’s pretext to judge and kill him.

This character shift comes out of nowhere, and is completely at odds with the Eko we’ve come to know. He feels more like the man he left behind in Nigeria, who justified his greed as helping his people. There is no hint as to why he seems to have shrugged off his new self, nor any evidence up to this point that he has been slipping back toward his old self. There’s no in-story logic to it at all.

Adewale [Akinnuoye-Agbaje], who played Mr. Eko, is another actor who basically forced the storytelling. We had like a four-season arc planned for that character. He’s an awesome character, we totally loved writing him. He was gonna have a whole thing with Locke, and essentially, Adewale said, ‘I don’t want to live in Hawaii anymore. I want to leave the show.’

The writers accommodated. This, to me, is one of the show’s biggest gaps, one of its biggest disappointments. To this day, I still wonder what that Eko story would have looked like. How it might have changed and complemented (and complicated) Locke’s story. I wouldn’t say it haunts me, but it does something very close.

1. Sayid

Oh, Sayid. From season 5 until maybe halfway through 6, it feels as if the writers ran out of ideas for what to do with him. His pained partnership with Ben is compelling, as is the role his attempt at pre-emptive revenge in 1977, but after that his character seemed to fall by the wayside as Nadia is casually killed off. As if they couldn’t think of anything more for him to do.

True, he has a noble, satisfying, redeeming death in “The Candidate,” but as one of the Oceanic Six and a core character, he deserves a sight better than what he got.

* * *

I don’t consider these problems damning. They’re unfortunate, but again I would say most shows, even the great ones, have at least one problem of this magnitude and scale. More importantly, these flaws are isolated, not systemic.

Lost is full of suspense and mystery, and continual surprises, not the least of which are the way these stories subvert tropes and expectations.

Lost‘s music is scored entirely by Michael Giacchino, whose unusual methods of producing different sounds gives it a feel unlike many other soundtracks out there, capable of eerie and creepy as well as heart-swelling moments.

Lost has an unparalleled ability to reinvent itself each season, expanding and re-contextualizing everything that has come before, while still remaining true to its past.

Even the structure of the show as a whole takes the form of a ring cycle, one of my favorite storytelling devices.

Some of these things are true about some shows, but there’s something extra about Lost. It’s more than the mere sum of its parts. To borrow a word from podcaster Dan Pashman, it has toothsinkability.

And ultimately, while all of these things contribute to Lost‘s inimitable flavor, they are not its essential core. The best measure of a good story is how it treats its ideas, its themes, and most importantly its characters. Lost always puts its characters and their stories first. Even the most extreme mythological moments, the most mind-warping revelations, always play service to what these moments mean to the survivors, and often in a deep and affecting way.

The best example I can give circles back to the beginning of this essay — to Locke, the figure I always think of and speak of when I try to describe why Lost is so great. At the end of “Walkabout,” Locke argues with the man from the travel agency in Sydney as his bus pulls away from the curb, leaving him behind. The camera pans out to show…no. Wait. That doesn’t…

Locke was in a wheelchair!?

I remember seeing this for the first time, my thoughts tripping and stumbling over each other as I tried to grasp just what it meant that he could walk now, but not then. Again the episode shows Locke waking up on the beach, wiggling his toe, and we feel a rush of cold understanding fall over us, and it makes sense. A dizzying, astonishing sort of sense: Locke was healed.

This is huge. To me, this is probably the most shocking moment in the entire show.

Yes, there are certainly crazier, more bizarre moments than this one. Yet by the time they come around, crazy and bizarre are what we expect, and the new twists are delicious, compelling new riffs on a theme we’ve already been hearing. Before this episode, though, we have no way of knowing that something like this is even possible. In this moment, Lost becomes the kind of show where anything can happen.

This moment is mythologically defining — but that doesn’t take away its emotional power. We aren’t hit over the head with the weirdness of it, but are drawn instead into the wonder, the awe, the joy in Locke’s reaction. The contrast between what the crash means to him, and what it means to everyone else, is piercing. Overwhelming joy, hope, ecstasy; but set against a sea of sorrow and chaos and fear.

This moment isn’t great for what it reveals, but for what it means to Locke. How it defines his character arc, and shapes his viewpoint of everything that will happen in the story.

* * *

So yes, I reject the sour and cynical disappointment so many viewers cling to even now, all these years after “The End.” These people weren’t approaching the story on its own terms, but on theirs. They wanted something that the show had never even attempted in the first place.

Lost has never been about the answers. It’s about the mystery. It’s never been about mythology, but character. It may be the only television show in existence where the setting itself is a character — in more than the merely figurative way people speak in when they say things like that. The Island doesn’t just have its own mood and atmosphere as a setting. It has, on some level or another, a will and agency of its own.

This is why the Island is so important. And this is why Lost is so important. The best stories are the ones that make us see the world through eyes other than our own — whether through people like Jack or Locke or Juliet, or through the eye of the Island itself.